undoware

dude, I've been reading posts like this since the nineties (on Slashdot.)

Terminals have been 'going away' for longer than I've been alive, and they will continue to diminish long after I'm gone.

The reason they don't ever get there is that the market as a whole is still increasing in size overall, even as the stock of TUI-natives dwindles. There are simply so many more people working on e.g. neovim, kakaoune, and himalaya (an email client) that the fact that there are even _more_ more people using GUIs simply doesn't matter as much.

Put another way: the increase in absolute numbers of TUI/CLI users is the statistic to watch, not the relative percentage of users.

Finally, terminal chops are a nerd status symbol -- a form of conspicuous consumption of time and muscle memory. Humans tend to drop status symbols _last_.

I don't brag about my use of VSCode, but I sure talk up my neovim config in interviews ;D

A "straw man" is a variety of argument.

This makes no argument; it is satire -- a caricature -- as has been repeatedly pointed out; hence, it cannot be a straw man.

Now, this is not to say that it might not blamelessly strike you as unfunny; in this case, though, you may want to reword your comment as "not funny IMO".

Shrugs I liked it

Also true at MSFT

Location: Vancouver, Canada Remote: yes Willing to relocate: yes Technologies: Typescript, React, NixOS, OpenBSD, Python Email: liz.mars@pm.me CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tq83z7BbX11WkKrm8ORQkLsiNTW...

Yes, but it's a shadow ban.

Thinking aloud, I suppose there are three kinds of bans:

1 - Actual, explicit bans (formal)

2 - Intentional shadowbans (decided by humans)

3 - De-facto shadowbans (unintentional artifacts of ML vertex weighting)

Note that the possibility of 3 occurs even if human intervention is needed to act upon the posts flagged by the ML --- the ML is, in effect, driving the 'attentional map' of the content moderator.

So this specific incident would probably be a case of #3, but it makes people angrier if you suggest it's #2, so that's what people are doing.

My gender, actually

I did this.

At 37 I was marginally employed. In 2019 I was FTE at MSFT.

It was tricky but worked out

You got this, kid

They are the same container but the entropy is reversed

IMO at MSFT there's a big cultural disconnect between the old-guard, who are of course senior management, and FOSS-forward teams. The needs of the latter are not always understood by the former. E.g. the recent HMR debacle with C#.

Part of the problem is that it's really hard to explain cultural significance to people outside a given culture, and FOSS is a strong culture, and so is The Microsoft Way, and the two are uneasy roommates right now.

I'd say -- politely -- that they are learning by doing, but there are still things to learn/do, and they'd probably say the same.

Anecdotal example:

Ironically, MSFT's first move after SolarWinds was to ban Linux from its internal network, CorpNet, for over a year, while they figured out how to do InTune for Linux.

Most folks didn't seem to notice, but as someone who lives and breathes Linux, it was like having my wings clipped.

(Why Linux? Why SolarWinds? I heard everything from "somebody's raspberry pi was ingress" to "zero trust fundamentalism", but I still don't know. We weren't told.)

It was awkward that there was not institutional capacity for securing these endpoints sooner.

Relatedly, here are some of the trends that I hope can be reversed. Pointing them out is a form of hopeful activity for me, because, like Rumplestiltskin, these are problems which cannot be solved unless they are named. Proviso: this list is WEIRD and is based on anecdotal observation from my own North American, relatively well-off life.

The skills we are losing were core human technologies, and, like reading and empirical science, hard-won. Specifically, we need to reverse declines in:

- Getting along with one another. Rapid differentiation of communities -- and indeed, the refactoring of the idea of 'community' as an affinity group -- has undermined the ability to do everything from build affordable housing ("NOT IN MY BACKYARD" etc) to respond to an actual, literal ground war in Europe against an unprovoked attack.

- One 'floor' down from that last point -- we've lost the ability to deploy what I'll call _imaginative_ or reflective empathy.

I'm using this term-of-art to distinguish what I'm pointing at from reflexive empathy, which is when you immediately experience slights to people with whom you identify as happening to you. Sadly, we've gotten a lot better at reflexive empathy, and a lot worse at its more cognitive, cosmopolitan sibling. This is a serious regression.

- Reductions in the number of close relationships. I don't have the stats handy but they are striking. Now, we all know that people who are lonelier tend to have worse quality-of-life and shorter lifespans, but what we don't talk about enough is the effect on thinking. People who are more isolated have fewer 'windows' on their train through life, and gain less understanding of this world. Every friend or social relation is a sort of window through which you get a fresh perspective, and with fewer windows, you will have less information, have fewer opportunities to practice vital skills, which, like singing, are either used regularly, or lost entirely.

Can these declines be reversed? Sure! Can we reverse them in time to fight climate change, instead of each other? ....Um! Let's blow on those dice and call it wind power ;D

I think the best medicine may be giving up attempts at perceiving an optimistic future. I don't have so much 'reasons for optimism' anymore as a list of negative trends that might still be reversible. Cf the amazing _Cruel Optimism_, by Lauren Berlant, on how straining to see good things that aren't there is considered harmful: https://www.dukeupress.edu/cruel-optimism

Their release schedule isn't that different than previous years.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that some people here are simply feeling the vibe less right now -- it's likely because of the woman-centered vibe, and HN leans dudeward.

As a woman, I think this is great! :D But it also means that if that's not your thing (and it can be, blamelessly, not your thing!) the content is going to appear more "generic" (in the words of OP,) more self-similar, as we humans tend to notice variations and differences in things that appeal to us. Wines, clothes, cars, guns, teas, pens, whatever. If it fascinates you, it's gonna have depth.

But if it doesn't? You're gonna see an undifferentiated wash.

This is the mechanism behind why I can get hyper-technical in my kitchen -- I like food -- but cars, which one of my old boyfriends was obssessed with, all seem more or less interchangeable. Same-y. Cut-and-paste.

Because I wasn't into cars, I couldn't really tell them apart.

But since I'm into food, I see tiny details! I can ~go on~ about the specific differences in, say, grades of USA steak, they are so different lol

Both Mapy and Windy.com are from the same devs and I paid for both, and both are exquisite pieces of engineering.

My first thought as well -- but it was phrased as, "of course there is some specific person here who, due to a long-running disagreement over facts, has been passively gathering relevant data over a period of years."

It's sort of like Rule 34, but for HN. "There is data of it"

Misses the most important reason.

Repetition creates symmetrical cases. As they say in German, 'einmal ist keinmal' -- once is never. Overly DRY code is incredibly non-educational.

Why?

Because you learn by comparing and contrasting -- if you can't compare, you can't contrast, and therefore, you cannot learn.

And I'll quickly duck back in to say that while there is an abundance of recent examples, including the early 2020 attempts to limit public use of n95 masks(!), there isn't a solution to the health-comms predicament per-se.

You still have to communicate what you're assigned and, yes, the better you do your job, the worse the next person will have it, when (not if) the science changes.

Such is life.

Yes, it works rather too well, in fact. So much so, that people subject to it will likely be slathering up, no matter what science finds out.

Again: Science changes; emotions do not; the job of public health comms is to generate emotions that roughly match science; but then science changes again, but the emotions do not.

The net result is that everyone's fear-compass is randomly pointing to findings from fifty years ago, which, incidentally, is why my last roommate couldn't cook.

The 31yo rock climber was terrified of salt. Why? His father had had a heart condition --- in nineties.

There are few things that could have brought the poor man more joy than ruining his dinner every night, which likely had the opposite effect than intended.

It's easy to spam links on this topic -- I went searching for this excellent summary:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-th...

And found these two as well; I'm sure you can dig up plenty more

https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/2...

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/health/research/04salt.ht...

impressive public-health comms technique, but again, will still 'show jet black' even if:

- you're wearing a sunscreen which is itself carcinogenic, and are being affected by this

- your sunscreen is destroying coral reefs

- your sunscreen washes off easily

- your suncreen is unpleasant to wear (making you unlikely to wear it)

- your body actually needed some sunlight anyway: https://www.outsideonline.com/health/wellness/sunscreen-sun-...

This is why public-health comms, a thing I have previously done in this tapas of careers, is very difficult to do in a way that does not itself cause some harm.

In this case, the visceral visualization of the effects of UV light overlooks the possibility (EDIT: leads the participant to overlook the possibility) that we were simply wrong about the 1:1 correlation between UV exposure and cancer.

Science is always changing, and deep-seated emotional reactions tend not to. One oft-overlooked goal of public health comms is to try not to generate so many of the latter that people can no longer accept the former.

This is incredibly exciting news, but I'd like to kick the tires real quick.

Main worry: The magic ingredient this time appears to be vanadium instead of lithium, but there's still a magic ingredient (at least, according to my cursory understanding of the tech, entirely due to the OP's link)

- How abundant is vanadium? Wikipedia says it's 'rarely found in nature' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium

- What are the geopolitics of vanadium? Under what conditions is it typically mined? Within which nation-states' territories is it typically found?

- What other industrial uses does vanadium have?

- What quantity is needed?

- Can we ramp up exploitation of deposits, or are there hard reasons (scarcity, remoteness, etc) that prevent this?

- EDIT: most importantly, are there other candidate elements that can, in the case of shortage or war, also provide service?

that sounds hard but I... don't often code in python?

I can see bolting a fallback regex mode for the few languages that have features which ts cannot (yet) accommodate.

And 'niche layered on niche' is -- well, it leaves me wondering how much you've actually used hx. The experience is nominal, the installation is sane, and it was way faster to get to 'genuinely pleasant' than nvim ever was.

As a plus, nix home-manager also handles helix config, which, as a nixos user, puts it over the top for me.

(home-manager also does nvim, but this is mostly mooted by my need for an elaborate (and turing-complete) Packer configuration, which has me using a separate git repo for nvim specifically)

I loved vi for decades, but I don't miss it. Neovim is my current go-to but even this feels stodgy these days. Helix Editor is probably my future -- it manages to have just the right features, but with saner defaults and syntax -- but it will take a while for me to work up the nerve to let go of the investment in muscle memory.

Having worked at a big tech company, I can report that there is an intense, career-making-or-breaking individual imperative for managers to prove the 'value' of soft assets like credibility or popularity.

In my opinion, the reason these companies are willing to shed vast amounts of credibility for cents on the dollar is a systematic mistaking of asset dividends for asset value, which is reified into the organizational culture -- because no one in the C-suite really knows better, not-knowing is selected for, and ultimately becomes a requirement for individual careers to progress.

The dynamic is easier to see in other parts of the economy. While the rent that a fancy house can earn, say, does in fact speak to the value of that house, the fact that it is available for rent in the first place also impacts the value. For literal houses, this offset can be overcome, but for something like your credibility or your integrity, it's lethal.

But that doesn't matter if your boss doesn't know this. All that they see is 'number go up'. Then, often, your number -- be it salary or rank or both - goes up too. And six months later, when the consequences of the firesale become clear, it's too late for the employer -- but not for you, the architect of this terrible idea! You've already augmented your own income, and you can go back on the job market asking for equal-or-better compensation.

Since the number of companies suffering from this acculturated cognitive bias is greater than 1, you can in effect ping-pong between two such companies while gutting both, making larger and larger paycheques with each bounce.

This process is even easier if you work for a really big company, because then you don't even have to change employers! You can just change divisions every six months. The next reorg is right around the corner.

Credibility-for-sale is apoptosis, pure and clean, and it's lucrative to induce, even by accident.

Raindrop. Every day, for all things. The snapshots of the pages it takes means that if I see something I can later say something, it doesn't matter who grooms the content meanwhile.

I feel you.

Ansible means yaml, and yaml reminds me of perl. But not in a fun nostalgic way. Like Perl, yaml has too many "intuitive" features that you never actually use but will for sure be learned, by you, in a hurry, when you typo.

Tbh Nixos is what I use instead of Ansible -- you just open Terminator or xargs or do a plain for-loop in a bash script equivalent, open as many ssh connections as you need, and in each, do a one-liner to git-pull the latest conf repo, and then do `nixos-rebuild switch`.

Rollbacks are just as simple, and the whole thing is idempotent.

Of course you have to have control over which OS is in use, but that's a good reason to advocate for Nixos in your workplace.

The declarative nix language also quite a journey to learn, but when you get it, nothing else will feel good enough again.

Remember to get the treesitter grammar if your editor supports it. I think there is a language server too

A set of three foot pedals: one for screen recordings, another for instant replay, and another for quick voice notes.

Usage: mash the leftmost pedal to toggle recording the screen; mash the middle pedal to save off the past 30 seconds of my activity (usually along with me verbally narrating what I'm doing, an oddball habit that has paid dividends thanks to this config) and finally, push-to-talk (drops an .mp3 in the appropriate folder; I usually just have it work the same as the leftmost pedal (i.e. saving an .mkv which just so happens to have user audio) because I'm too lazy to bash-script ffmpeg and OBS is already open.

Hardware: I have a tri-pedal set, made by the same manufacturer documented in the 'Vim Clutch' article here on HN (I'm too lazy to go find the URL but it will come up easily in a search.) The pedals are mapped to shortcuts in OBS for the functions described above.

Software: OBS Studio, Gnome desktop (NixOS), and Input Remapper. (More on this last one further down.)

Caveat: This currently only works under Xorg (not Wayland) because Wayland doesn't let OBS grab shortcuts outside its own window (Wayland is such a Karen.) There's a workaround that I'm working on, but it involves an OBS plugin called obs-websocket and a straightforward bit of Python scripting that I have nonetheless yet to finish, as well as Input Remapper (https://github.com/sezanzeb/input-remapper) so Xorg it is for now.

For bonus points, I made the destination folder the 'attachments' folder in my Obsidian vault. Then I can index them by subject, a task that is surprisingly entertaining, as links from topic pages in Obsidian.

Honestly. I don't remember how I thought before. This is the perfect thinking machine.

> This only logically follows if literally all cryptocurrencies are proof-of-work (let alone proof-of-work using a hashing algorithm as energy-intensive as SHA256). This is patently false

Against this, I argue:

- easier/cheaper hashing actually doesn't work -- the yield curve in bitcoin mining is there for a reason, and without it, I doubt PoW would fly.

> ...and therefore the assertion that an outright ban on the very concept of a cryptocurrency is somehow a net benefit to global society requires more of a supporting argument than "Bitcoin exists and is currently dominant".

Bitcoin is an investment, because it's terrible for small, frequent transactions. (Both in UX and eco terms.) Reductio ad absurdum: If it doesn't remain dominant, then it has no use case, as it's a lousy investment instrument. If the above goes throw for bitcoin, then, a fortirori, the same reductio can also apply to any other PoW coin.

And don't get me started on PoS -- it's literally just an MLM you can buy into. A system for centralizing wealth in the hands of whoever already has it.

> Right, and that totally eliminated (or hell, at least even significantly curtailed) copyright infringement in those jurisdictions, right? If you sincerely believe that, then I've got an NFT of Ecuador to sell you.

It did, though? I remember the nineties well -- relatives would go to China and come back with armfuls of factory-pressed CDs and DVDs. Anything you wanted. Clean and new-in-box. That went away because of IP protection baked into trade agreements. And before you say 'BitTorrent', please remember, the analogy is _factory_ piracy -- because, like nineties piracy, Bitcoin requires mining rigs, and these are large, physical assets, like factories, and this is unlikely to change. What happened to IP after Napster is another thing, and does not invalidate the analogy. A similar virtualization/p2p move is unlikely to work for mining. (But I could always be wrong about this -- I'm open to persuasion, if you can paint me a word-picture of what competitive distributed mining would look like, other than NK Monero malware.)

> By your metric, banning only proof-of-work cryptocurrencies would be more than sufficient, assuming that such a ban could be enforced...

It's not hard -- a helicopter and a FLIR cam would work, as well as cooperation from the energy provider. Choke off the supply of mining, and wait for this to in turn cause transactions to become unwieldy.

> The cat's out of Pandora's box.

Shoot it, then.

> You can't "uninvent" peer-to-peer networking, and you can't "uninvent" decentralized ledgers.

Yes, but you can ban the sale of various things. Laws are possible things.

> Nation-states can impose whatever bans they want; unless they're willing to pull a PRC or DPRK and start committing rampant privacy violations for censorship reasons, those bans are toothless.

Expand/explain. I do not understand the point you attempt to make.

To be honest -- and this says plenty about the industry, but, yes, me as well -- I got a job at a large tech company by sleeping with the right engineer at Burning Man, got the referral, and then did well in the interviews and H1B lottery. #LeanIn.

In truth, industry referrals are themselves a part of the compensation package, as they give (generally male) more-senior engineers social leverage over anyone who wants a piece of the pie.

I played the game but I hate the game.

All the same, doing so tripled my income and moved to the USA.

--

Postscriptum:

My recommendation to industry: abolish the referral system. It's shockingly close to the recruitment pattern used in MLM schemes -- in this case, my contact got a bonus from "helping" with my recruitment.

Imagine if surgeons were hired like this.

Most of Green's article goes through, except for the answer to the 'climate change' objection (Objection 1). Which is, of course, the most important, and without it, the article as a whole also fails to convince.

The problem is in this passage (mine the emphasis):

> But the question we should be asking is not whether to be angry about the power consumption of proof-of-work mining. We should be trying to figure out the right path out of this mess. And more concretely, whether there’s a path forward which is more likely to produce *a good outcome* than what is already happening in the industry — namely, that projects are rapidly deploying cleaner technologies to replace proof-of-work.

1. What is a "good outcome?" A good outcome for whom? A great outcome for most species, and most h.sapiens, would be an outright ban, because of the risk spread.

Think actuarially:

There is always the possibility the crypto industry trends cleaner, but legacy chains will be around for yonks, and bluechip crypto is unlikely to ever move off PoW. This means that, yes, while there is a possibility the industry might trend clean, this is an emormously polite way of saying that the downside risk is both severe and likely.

Put another way: if you were selling planet insurance, and you found out they had a lot of PoW crypto going on but were thinking about maybe one day kicking the habit, you'd probably either charge them a fortune or tell them to take a hike, right? Think actuarially.

There is also a suggestion that banning mining (or crypto transactions) might just move the action to other jurisdictions. This suggestion seems strained: for while a coordinated international treaty or ban might make time to confect, it's certainly not impossible. Powerful nations might, say, weave a crypto-ban requirement into multilateral trade agreements, like we already do for intellectual property.

A ban on crypto mining would likely be even easier to implement and spread, as most nation-states correctly view crypto as a threat to their command&control. I mean, look at Ecuador.

Finally, banning crypto would also be something nation-states could take back to their populations as proof of progress on climate change. And they'd even be right.

As harsh as it is for a supporter of crypto (and former industry wonk and former whole-coiner) to say this, I'm sincerely beginning to think that the lasting value of this whole Blockchain Thing has been the thought it has provoked. I, for one, would never have had to think so deeply about the nature of value and currency.

But you know what? These days, I stick to fiat.

I once attempted to buy a laser for an EDM music art project on Amazon and wound up with something that is more or less intentionally down-marked as a less dangerous class of laser.

I only found out about it (and thus saved my retinas) because some ML or another decided to queue up a bunch of laser-related videos, and it just so happened that the video which surfaced in my feed went into how weapons enthusiasts were using Amazon, and this specific brand, to sell eyeball eaters to folks who like to melt pop cans in ravines at 100 yards or whatever.

Like, when I went back, there were literally laser marks on my apartment door from where I tried the laser out, after receiving it.

Amazon seems to be pursuing a sort of 'common-carrier' status for material goods, and it's a libertarian no-rules Snow Crash dystopia.

Handedness is a fact. I'm left-handed, but my passport doesn't need to say so. Why is it 'sensible' to include this? Shall we include my favourite foods as well?