vijucat

Maybe demons were those who learned to cogitate better and ended up being the Ted Kacynzkis of their ilk :)

I literally feel sad when I turn off the blue light (using f.lux) or turn on eye saver mode on my monitor. No idea how to fix this.

Attach that NFC tag to a 40 kg weight in the other room (and commit to carrying the weight to the phone, not the other way round ;) ), then you might appreciate the value-add. We are very physical creatures.

Follow up with, "Please check again"

Ha ha. There could be valuables, you know. Anyway, I wanted to edit it to write, "most people are good, or at least compliant", but now the window has passed :)

Because I had this epiphany about how we lead such passive lives, complying with the rules of the system around us.

Just look at the airport luggage belt. Runs on reciprocal altruism. Most people are not good (and this was true even before CCTV, for the cynics :) )

> It has nothing to do with the price. I’ve worked with great devs who were cheap and terrible devs who were expensive. And it’s hard to tell which is which till the project ships or fails to ship.

Very interesting, thanks!

Great list! All make sense to me.

Genuine question: what prevents the NYT from offshoring these jobs if they can be done from home? I feel for you, as a fellow worker, but unless there is something hyper-local about the job such as regulatory requirements or trust issues with IP protection, the jobs will go to the ones who work hard without complaining too much.

Artisan is not a bad metaphor. Take furniture. There's a place for IKEA, and there's a place for expensive, hand-crafted Scandinavian furniture.

https://www.scandinaviastandard.com/this-is-why-that-sofa-is...

Honestly, how many of these jobs can be not done by hard working folks in Nigeria, India, or wherever? I understand that outsourcing is a contentious issue, but the fact remains that the most probably outcome is to send these jobs off to people who are happy to do it for 1/5th the price and with 1/100 the number of complaints.

Edit: to those downvoting this, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41504026#41506801 above. Just one example

I'm documenting the (scattered) implementation changes related to the feature / bug-fix, in both code and test cases, using the hashtag. You could just use the JIRA ticket number, too, but it's a bit dry.

One other thing I'd like to add is greppable comments! In the same vein as TODO and FIXME, I use hashtags in comments to drop hints to future me reading the code. #learning is a universal one:

// #learning: transparent color using color.new(color.white, 100). This is GREAT for hiding plot() lines during inapplicable periods (such as when no trade is on)

But project-specific hashtags are quite useful, too.

// #60within600: bunch API calls to not hit the 60 calls within 10 minutes limit

// This memoizes fn call results to prevent #60within600

The hashtagging was inspired long ago by del.icio.us, if you remember that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

What about if I say, "Please don't smash that like button" or "Smash that like button if you're an idiot"? Just wondering if it is based on transcript-grepping or does it even consider sentence semantics? (I know, overkill. Please don't implement that, YT engineers. You've heard of "boiling the ocean to make a cup of tea", right?)

That's hardcore. I admire people who work on Linux (I just use WSL 2 Ubuntu on Windows). Apparently, NixOS has it's fans! See:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/14clrjh/how_is_nixos...

As an aside, I'm surprised how Apple fans think they're the one with the aesthetics advantage when their Lord and Master allowed them to change the color of their menu bar in...2023? :)

If I'm fiddling with the terminal or the font, I know it's because I'm procrastinating. I've trained myself to quickly recognize such side-quests and feel a quick punch of hormonal urgency, which helps me get back to work (with mintty and Consolas). You don't need the bells and whistles.

Love such articles where I learn something new. cdb is completely new to me. It's apparently the Microsoft Console Debugger. For others like me who were wondering how `eb win32u!NtUserSetLayeredWindowAttributes c3` neutered the window animation:

"By executing this command, you are effectively replacing the first byte of the `NtUserSetLayeredWindowAttributes` function with a `ret` instruction. This means that any call to `NtUserSetLayeredWindowAttributes` will immediately return without executing any of its original code. This can be used to bypass or disable the functionality of this function"

(Thanks to GitHub Copilot for that)

Also see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

I used to chase kites barefoot as a kid in India. I swear there was a time when I detected, while running with my eyes towards the sky, that I am stepping over a large piece of broken glass, like a fragment of a bottle of Coke, and I instinctively twisted my ankle so that instead of putting pressure on it, my foot and the bottle would just roll sideways. I just regained my posture, stepped hard to the side, unscathed, and continued running after the kite. There was not even a scratch on my foot. I still think about that incident. Maybe it was because I was so thin and lightweight that I managed to escape uninjured? What if it went horribly wrong and resulted in permanent nerve damage?

IMHO, a lot of these analyses suffer from survivorship bias; the ones who died don't get to tell you it was a bad idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

I've always love WinAmp due to the simple reason that it is keyboard friendly. For example, the 5 buttons for Previous, Play, Pause, Stop, Next map to zxcvb. Simple and fun. Operations like searching for and queuing up files to play are lightning fast compared to Spotify, YT Music, et al. Also, I absolutely detest how YT Music keeps A/B testing ALL THE TIME, changing the location of things around. Ultimately, a website is never in your control.

I was somehow reminded of this guy who once wowed me in an interview by coding up a small graphics demo rather quickly. Turns out later that that was the exact one program he could code without being hand-held EVERY SINGLE MOMENT. I laugh whenever I remember that incident (from early on in my career, in my defense).

You have to build a repertoire of questions that defeat rote memorization, prove real experience, and show genuine ability to solve unseen problems...

Once superintelligence takes over all jobs, as it is claimed will happen (, and there is an AIBI : AI Basic Income), I hope we are free to do more such projects :)

Interesting, thanks!

Makes sense, thanks

Nice article. Definitely need more kindness in this achievement society. One small crib, though:

> In Spanish, we have a saying, "Maestro Liendre: De tó sabe, pero de ná entiende." I don't really know (and don't want) to translate it because it loses its punch, but it fits perfectly here.

Wait, why mention it if I, the reader, cannot understand the saying or how it is even relevant to the article, but leave me with the tease that "but it fits perfectly here". Very puzzling, to say the least. Google Translate tells me "Master Niendre: He knows everything, but he understands nothing". Now I'm even more confused. That is so pithy and unambiguous that I really have to ask: what is it about the Spanish version that "loses its punch" when translated to English?!

I absolutely love how good the voices are in the VCTK-VIS dataset (109 of them!). I found it easy to install Coqui on WSL and it is able to use CUDA + the GPU quite effectively. p236 male and p237 female are my choices, but holy cow, 109 quality voices still blows my mind. Crazy how you had to pay for a good TTS just a year ago, but now, it's commoditized. Hope you find this useful:

    CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES="0" python TTS/server/server.py --model_name tts_models/en/vctk/vits --use_cuda True


 def play_sound(response):
     #learning : you have to use a semaphore to serialize calls to winsound.PlaySound(), which freaks out with "Failed to play sound" if you try to play 2 clips at once
     semaphore.acquire()
     try:
         winsound.PlaySound(response.content, winsound.SND_MEMORY | winsound.SND_NOSTOP)
     finally:
         # Always release the permit, even if PlaySound raises an exception
         semaphore.release()

Love the work ethic, thanks!

I love such stories. Thanks for sharing. I'd be super glad to read about your process, your note-taking techniques, etc if you ever write a blog post about it!

It seems you were immediately downvoted (I see this comment at the bottom and in grey). The cult is strong on HN and cannot bear this kind of reality, Sir.

It's perfect, actually. Its pithiness reflects the limitations of the walled garden in which the mind that conceived it lives. Normally, when you read "I fucked with the iPad. Hard", you'd think that at the least a soldering iron was involved. Maybe even wires, multimeters. Maybe hacking the boot process using gdb. Maybe an oscilloscope? That would be wow.

No. When your range of expressivity is passive consumer to passive-aggressive consumer, you are reduced to a small essay that ends with the whimper, "Can't wait to see how I feel about iPads next week". The only qualification to be a repeat Apple consumer is the complete lack of self-awareness and this essay is beautiful in encapsulating the cheery vacuousness of the cult.