wharvle

What's special is we decided that having a different category for things humans do is useful.

It can both be true that everything humans do or create is natural because all of existence and everything in it is natural, and also that some things humans do or create are artificial or un-natural, without contradiction, because context may be taken into account, and the same words can mean different things depending on how and why they're employed.

Those of us who were supporting Windows machines in the ‘00s remember when 100% of Windows machines not behind NAT were pwned in minutes, while those with NAT were fine indefinitely. Should a firewall have been doing that job? Yes. Were firewalls doing that job, in practice? No, NAT did, and it was very, very effective.

I have… concerns about removing NAT from everyone’s house now that IOT is a thing. Could it be done safely? Yes. Will it? Signs point to no.

Stuff on the Internet breaks if I enable IPv6 on my Google Fiber router (been that way since I first got Fiber years ago—though I think Amazon works with it enabled now, which it didn’t before).

My T-Mobile connection issues an IPv6 address but fails online “is my IPv6 working?” tests.

I enjoy it on my private networks but simply can’t rely on it on the Internet yet.

My home connection fails because it’s disabled (of course).

Kicked my phone over to my T-Mobile cell connection. Finds that I have an ipv6 address, but dies on one of the first tests.

It’s 2024 and I have two major US ISPs available and neither will let me reliably use IPv6 unless I’m on a vpn and the addresses are all private ones that don’t (logically) route to the Internet.

The deeper insight is that every definition of a word breaks down when you try to pin it precisely and in some absolute, universal-context sense to an exact meaning. That doesn’t mean they can’t be very, very useful.

IDK, I did fine with them and find thinking in them natural (I think of fractional division as division, in fact, though I certainly understand the multiplication analogy); I’ve just known enough people who lost track of math at fractions that I doubt it’s coincidence.

I’m not saying I don’t get it, I’m saying others have told me that they found the explanations and instructions they were given nonsensical.

I re-invented what turned out to be short division (no joke! I wouldn’t learn it had a name until I was in my late 20s) because I hated long division so much, same year we started doing long division in school (4th grade? 3rd? IDK).

Fits in about the same space as the original problem unless it’s printed so small that you have to rewrite it, and way less room for transcription errors. I also find it clearer but that may just be me (fwiw I’m “bad at math”—I find it incredibly boring and basically can’t follow proof- and equation/identity-based stuff, I have to turn it all into algorithmic thinking to have a prayer of understanding it; i.e. my opinion on the superiority of short division is that of a mathematical imbecile, so, grain of salt)

> I blame this on my Chemistry teacher - a class which I was also taking at the time - who spoke little English and had never taught in the United States until the year I landed in her class.

It doesn’t help that in chemistry, 1 + 1 may be 1. Or 3. :-)

[edit] short division:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_division

Under the “example” section, the little superscripts are what you write in by hand on the problem as you work it, at least as I did it. 9/4 in the hundreds place is 2 with 1 remainder, so write 2 up above as part of the solution and a 1 superscript next to the 5 in the problem itself (tens place), now that’s 15, divide that, 3 goes in the tens place of the solution, write the remainder (3) next to the digit in the ones place as a superscript and do it again, if you need to keep going just add a decimal point and zeroes as required.

Way faster than working long division, takes up less space, and less error prone (imo). What’s actually going on is clearer (again, imo)

One third times one fifth loses a lot of folks. As does addition and subtraction of fractions that don’t start with the same denominator, for that matter. They might figure out what to do to pass the test, but they may not get it.

I’ve seen a later fall-off point at factoring. Feels pointless (the motivations are… distant at best), tedious as hell, lots of guessing involved. “So much for math making sense, fuck this, guess I’m out.”

Anecdotally, it seems like working with fractions is where a lot of people fall off the math-train and never get back on.

… yes, that early.

A couple months ago I got a new router and some stuff didn’t work until I turned off ipv6 (I don’t recall what, exactly)

I tried that solution early because when I first got Google Fiber the Amazon store website didn’t load, on any machine in our house, until I turned off ipv6. If stuff tries to route over ipv6, it doesn’t work, has been my entire experience with the protocol on the open internet (private networks seem Ok)

Childcare, elder care, home improvement, picking up a piece or two of litter while on a stroll, cooking & cleaning, gardening. These don't contribute to GDP, but if all this unpaid work halted and the people doing it suddenly demanded payment, the economy wouldn't exactly be in for a good time—we do need some amount of this, and it's not clear the amount people have time for is optimal, rather than just an accident.

Regardless, I don't think a ton of people would be content with UBI money and would probably do at least some paying work anyway. People want to live a certain place, have a certain lifestyle, provide for a family (have a family!), send the kids to good schools, have nice stuff, have some pocket money for doing stuff with friends, et c., and none of that goes away just because everyone's getting enough money to scrape by. Concerns about an epidemic of people declining to do anything productive because they won't literally starve on the street if they don't, seem like fantasy to me, and I've yet to see any remotely-serious proposal for UBI that pays out enough that people wouldn't still want to double, or triple, or quadruple that amount, by also having a job.

I know some folks who are probably in the category of people that some worry would stop working entirely (low-paid, not-great prospects, drug enjoyers to a greater degree than is probably, ah, healthy) but guarantee they would not. They'd still want to have money for, like, all the stuff you can spend money on that's not barely-scraping-by, and they'd want it enough to keep working. Now, they might put up with a little less bullshit at work, and employers & managers that can't seem to help treating everyone terribly may have to adjust, or else suffer, if being unemployed isn't quite as bad as it is now....

Childcare, gardening (with surplus to share, maybe!), elder care, home improvement projects. Art, writing. Collecting stories and genealogies for family. Knitting and sewing.

People do tons of work even when they’re not being told to, in my experience. It’s sometimes “worth” a ton less than the time they put into it, and they’re usually making little or no money at it, but that doesn’t make it not-work.

I find that, for me, this is a symptom of specialization and the “day job”.

If I can dive into some coding one week and whip the garden and landscaping into shape the next and work on a book the next et c, I thrive working longer hours than that.

It’s when I’m doing the same. Damn. Shit. Day after day, week after week, month after month, that I feel drained to exhaustion after doing just a few hours of it.

People already do shitloads of unpaid work. I expect there’d be even more of that, under basic income. I could definitely be doing a lot more of that if I didn’t need a paycheck—there’s demand for a lot more of it than I do.

Though, sure, inability to account for how much that’s worth might make our productivity metrics go nuts.

You don’t get dirty when you plant a tree in Animal Crossing and have to do a bunch of extra laundry. No grit under your nails that sticks around for a couple days and sometimes ends up in your food. You don’t pull a muscle and spend a whole week miserable. You don’t get blisters. You don’t want to go plant a tree but then you can’t for real-life days on end because the weather is bad. You don’t get mosquito bites, or worry about ticks maybe giving you a debilitating illness.

You don’t have to go find the shovels, mulch, scrap cardboard, whatever. Maybe craft a shovel, but that may take less time than walking to the garage. It’s a minute or less to reach the spot you want to plant it. You will not dig and hit a big rock and have to relocate, or have to worry about hitting utilities. The tree’s roots will not trash your sidewalk if you plant it in the wrong place. The tree will not fail to grow.

“Work” in video games is rarely anything at all like real life “work”, even before you layer on workplace bureaucracy and regulations and stuff. There’s no mess, no danger, (generally) no actual costs, and usually you can’t really screw it up, and if you do, there are no actual consequences. Stuff like travel times or how long it takes to do boring tasks are usually compressed.

Eh, it’s been fast in the real world for quite a while. I think it’s due to two main things:

1) Startup time had to be fast because of how it worked in its most common use case (yes, yes, FPM, but still) which tends to encourage or require making everything fast.

2) Writing C modules for PHP is relatively easy and it has a culture of anything halfway important being in C, going back to the early days of the language. The answer for how to be really fast with real-world workloads in almost every scripting language is basically “get out of it and into C ASAP” but PHP’s culture embraces that more than most.

Well, once we ID the problem there’s still the “fix it” part. The fact that so much of the world is heading the wrong way on this is not reassuring that we have any realistic hope of doing that.

Restricting spying and indefinite data retention, and making companies responsible for content they don’t just host but promote, would likely kill engagement-first social media and “the feed”. And are things we should do anyway.

1) It’s not as bad if the logo or name is at least the manufacturer of the object. There’s an argument to be made that it’s a form of standing behind your product: this is good enough that we don’t think you’ll come to think ill of us.

2) Some of us in fact do avoid wearing logos. Nicer (and not even that nice, necessarily) clothes, bags, shoes, et c. tend not to have them, or at least make them very small. Logos for something other than the company that made the item would be even worse. Large logos and legible clothing more generally signal things I’d prefer not to signal, so… I don’t. Freebies in that category get worn around the house or as a base layer.

Go is what I reach for if my other options might be Java or Python but I don’t want deployment and support to be really stupid and awful.

Rust’s close alternative is C++. Maybe also C? I don’t know if Rust can fill its niche of ultra-portable libraries that are relatively easy to import and use in tons and tons of other languages & systems.

Looking at weight gain for immigrants and long-term visitors really shows how hopeless this is to fight individually. It’s not that other countries’ citizens are individually making better choices, it’s that… they don’t live in America.

Something’s just totally fucked about our culture when it comes to food and activity. A few can overcome it, but relying on individual willpower to get us out of this mess is clearly never going to work.

That leaves figuring out what’s wrong with our culture and fixing that (hard, probably multiple generations to achieve) or drugs (available now, doesn’t require coordination to achieve, people who need it can just go get it)

The majority of complaints I’ve seen have been of the sort “he says X is true and doesn’t even bother to consider that Y!”

… but he does. Like two paragraphs later. He states that specific criticism, and addresses it. Maybe not well! But that’s rarely the complaint.

I think the form of the book threw some folks who weren’t used to that sort of thing—a series of assertions and statements unbroken by digression, spanning one or more paragraphs, followed by paragraphs directly stating and addressing many criticisms a reader may have come up with.

“Tested grades and subjects” includes math basically everywhere. Those weren’t considered here.

Again, you may be right, but this study doesn’t really support what you’re claiming.

The main trouble in my city is certain snarley interchanges in which you’ll never make it to the lane you need for your exit if you aren’t, much of the time, way too close to the car in front of you.

My wife taught for about 10 years. Can confirm, at least in our state, the benefits are not the “cushy” state employee benefits that many suppose exist (actually, our state employees have trash benefits, too—you go federal if you want good bennies in that sort of job, here). Only way to have decent benefits in education is to go into admin (supers and assistant-supers get totally different, and far better, benefits in many districts—go figure)

She left teaching for WFH, a ~40% total-comp increase, and a far better work environment. Turns out the skills and experiences a good teacher tends to accumulate are really valuable to companies.

States that don’t require higher degrees often have a wall on the pay scale that’s hit early in one’s career, without a graduate degree.

What’s weird about the market for teaching master’s degrees, at least (idk about PhDs) is that this generates a ton of demand for them, but it makes no difference how good the program is. Teachers don’t care because they don’t really matter that much for improving teaching skill. Schools don’t care—pay bump is the same no matter what.

This has all the effects one might guess on the quality of these programs—almost all are very easy, because nobody involved cares how rigorous they are, and one party would generally prefer they not be very difficult. Whole thing’s a joke, total waste of money and teachers’ time.

TFA:

> Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors.

(Borrowing reasthenotes1’s quote elsewhere in the thread)

What you wrote may or may not be true, but this study doesn’t do much to support it.

The stress when it’s in-session is pretty bad, though. And a lot of teachers work a summer job to make ends meet, it’s often not time off.

The summers off are basically the only notable perk, too. At least in my state. Healthcare’s expensive and bad and gets worse every year. Pay’s bad. Work environment is usually bad. Retirement’s ok-ish but doesn’t close the gap on the poor pay.

Who cares about responsibility? I want more efficient price signaling. Bringing spending more in line with intent improves price signaling, so, gives us more utility from this whole capitalism thing. Doing this also happens to benefit and strengthen the weakest actors in the economy, and to make them more-confident economic actors.

It’s all win except for the companies getting free money for no reason. Why not fix this?

[edit] put it this way: if easy visibility into subscriptions and standardized, easy cancellation mechanisms were already mandated, would there be a strong case for changing that?