I have a theory that there's basically two types of disagreements, disagreements on definitions, and disagreements on value systems.
In this case Microsoft values downplaying this issue, so when that is at the top of their value system their decisions should make sense following that.
Since this is just a pet theory I'm very interested to hear critiques on it.
Disagreements on definition are a little bit easier, because then you can just talk about the definitions and resolve your differences there... For example let's say IDK You're trying to sort out how to design a software system, and everyone is speaking in terms of design patterns, but they haven't yet spelled out the details of what those designed patterns are, then that could probably lead to a lot of confusion if when you say A I think of A', and another person is thinking of A''.
From the discussion of Brad Myers' classic 1990 paper (originally published by the ACM CHI conference in 1986, then updated in 1990 in the Journal of Visual Languages & Computing), "Taxonomies of Visual Programming and Program Visualization" (where Brad dropped by to answer questions):
>Brad Myers' paper answers the age-old argument about whether or not spreadsheets are visual programming languages!
>Google sheets (and other google docs) can be programmed in "serverless" JavaScript that runs in the cloud somewhere. It's hellishly slow making sheets API calls, though. Feels like some kind of remote procedure call. (Slower than driving Excel via OLE Automation even, and that's saying something!) Then it times out on a wall clock (not cpu time) limit, and breaks if you take too long.
>A CS grad student friend of mine was in a programming language class, and the instructor was lecturing about visual programming languages, and claimed that there weren't any widely used visual programming languages. (This was in the late 80's, but some people are still under the same impression.)
>He raised his hand and pointed out that spreadsheets qualified as visual programming languages, and were pretty darn common.
>They're quite visual and popular because of their 2D spatial nature, relative and absolute 2D addressing modes, declarative functions and constraints, visual presentation of live directly manipulatable data, fonts, text attributes, background and foreground colors, lines, patterns, etc. Some even support procedural scripting languages whose statements are written in columns of cells.
>Maybe "real programmers" would have accepted spreadsheets more readily had Lotus named their product "Lotus 012"? (But then normal people would have hated it!)
Excerpt from "Taxonomies of Visual Programming and Program Visualization", by Brad A Myers, 1990/3/1, Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, Volume 1, Issue 1, pages 97-123:
Spreadsheets, such as those in VisiCalc or Lotus 1-2-3, were designed to help nonprogrammers manage finances. Spreadsheets incorporate programming features and can be made to do general purpose calculations [71] and therefore qualify as a very-high level Visual Programming Language. Some of the reasons that spreadsheets are so popular are (from [43] and [1]):
1. the graphics on the screen use familiar, concrete, and visible representation which directly maps to the user's natural model of the data,
2. they are nonmodal and interpretive and therefore provide immediate feedback,
3. they supply aggregate and high-level operations,
4. they avoid the notion of variables (all data is visible),
5. the inner world of computation is suppressed,
6. each cell typically has a single value throughout the computation,
7. they are nondeclarative and typeless,
8. consistency is automatically maintained, and
9. the order of evaluation (flow of control) is entirely derived from the declared cell dependencies.
The first point differentiates spreadsheets from many other Visual Programming Languages including flowcharts which are graphical representations derived from textual (linear) languages. With spreadsheets, the original representation in graphical and there is no natural textual language.
Action Graphics [41] uses ideas from spreadsheets to try to make it easier to program graphical animations. The 'Forms' system [43] uses a more conventional spreadsheet format, but adds sub-sheets (to provide procedural abstraction) which can have an unbounded size (to handle arbitrary parameters).
A different style of system is SIL-ICON [49], which allows the user to construct 'iconic sentences' consisting of graphics arranged in a meaningful two-dimensional fashion, as shown in Figure 5. The SIL-ICON interpreter then parses the picture to determine what it means. The interpreter itself is generated from a description of the legal pictures, in the same way that conventional compilers can be generated from BNF descriptions of the grammar.
10. Conclusions
Visual Programming and Program Visualization are interesting areas that show promise for improving the programming process, especially for non-programmers, but more work needs to be done. The success of spreadsheets demonstrates that if we find the appropriate paradigms, graphical techniques can revolutionize the way people interact with computers.
>By the way, something I always meant to ask you, Brad:
How does "C32" fit into your acronym theme of gemstones and rocks? Is it a teeny tiny 4x4x2 carbon atom block of diamond? How many carats would that be?
>Brad Myers wrote several articles in that book about his work on PERIDOT and GARNET, and he also developed C32:
>C32: CMU's Clever and Compelling Contribution to Computer Science in CommonLisp which is Customizable and Characterized by a Complete Coverage of Code and Contains a Cornucopia of Creative Constructs, because it Can Create Complex, Correct Constraints that are Constructed Clearly and Concretely, and Communicated using Columns of Cells, that are Constantly Calculated so they Change Continuously, and Cancel Confusion
>Spreadsheet-like system that allows constraints on objects to be specified by demonstration. Intelligent cut and paste. Implemented using Garnet.
I am currently using a Fovitec Bicolor 650 LED panel - it was cheap and I am cheap. I replaced the power supply with a higher-wattage unit because it flickered at max power, that might be enough to make me not recommend it but it works for me.
I previously used some adhesive LED strip lights on a 24x24 plate of aluminum. If DIY electronics are your aesthetic, go for it!
Since it's that time of year again for my fellow northerners with SAD, film lights can be wonderfully bright, and the heat is a welcome side benefit!
Screw Verilux with their overpriced "10,000 lux" 10W panel (only at less than 6 inches from your face), instead get a high-CRI studio light over my reading chair and I'll be happy all winter.
I am still irrationally annoyed that somebody made a Wikipedia article for their own made-up definition of high vs. low fantasy ("another world" vs. "our world", as opposed to the common definition, which was basically Tolkien vs. GRR Martin), based on a single decades-old article that didn't even mention the phrase "low fantasy", and managed to unilaterally change the definition.
No one could find a reference to contest it with, because nobody was writing articles defining terms that everyone understood; and the original editor's reference was not available online at the time, so no one could look at it and say "Uh, this is just some rando saying it would be cool if we called secondary-world stories 'high fantasy'."
Now the original, bogus reference is gone from the article, replaced with 20 low-effort articles that are obviously sourced from the same Wikipedia page they're being used to support. Boom, citogenesis! https://xkcd.com/978/
I need to know what version of ChatGPT you were using, because this is a critical piece of information that everyone just blatantly ignores, and I can only imagine that it's out of ignorance of the significance of the difference.
This is what happened when I asked ChatGPT 4...
ME
Give me hints without outright telling me the answer to the riddle: "What is always hungry, needs to be fed, and makes your hands red?"
ChatGPT 4
Hint 1: This object can be found in many homes, usually in a specific room.
Hint 2: It is not a living creature, but it does "consume" things.
Hint 3: The part about hands turning red relates to a common physical response to a certain temperature.
Hint 4: It's a crucial tool for a common household task.
Hint 5: While it can't eat in the traditional sense, you do put things into it quite frequently.
ME
What's the answer?
ChatGPT 4
The answer to the riddle is a "fire" or "fireplace." It's always hungry for more fuel (like wood), needs to be fed to keep burning, and the heat from the fire can make your hands red.
I think this is the missing part of the conversation. Musks' 2:30 AM nasty-gram emails... Apple starting to pick up the whip...
Companys keep having RTO policies. They keep escallating the pissy nastygrams & unspecific threats. But even when it's merely 2-3 days a week, people just don't show up.
We've had "quiet quitting" but this isn't quitting... it's a different resistance. And I think these RTO plans are going to keep crashing into oblivion. The tide has turned. This long-standing norm of being in-office all the time is dead, and no one has figured out a single useful carrot to dangle to get us back. Often the RTO is worse situations than when we left office.
This following rant is just me off-gassing & only semi-related. Our own company recently announced an upscaled RTO. As a city-dweller, it's a nearly 90m commute out to the suburbs (one way) via light-rail, after they closed our in-city office that was a 5m bike ride away. These fucking clowns don't give a rats ass & don't think for a second about the asymmetry of their ask. To them, it's like, oh, you're within 30 miles, this can't be a real burden on anyone. Because they're a bunch of out of touch suburban wankers who drive everywhere, with not the faintest fuck-all clue of how other folks live. To them, it's: 2 days, that's not bad.
But even 1 day is almost 2x the entire weekly commute I had, and by awful & expensive metro-rail versus a delightful on bicycle ride. To an awful business park, versus being inside a great city.
The people asking for RTO are useless. The asks are all hidden anonymous shitty figures. The workers, I hope, just don't do it. I've been doing 1 day a week, with the nod from my managers to just quietly subtract commute time from my work-day-hours. The clowns "in charge" realized no one had any respect for the RTO, & eventually realized tons of people just didn't show up. So now they're starting to tell the managers they have to keep attendance, that there's gonna be some real policing. But frankly it's the managers who skip the most. Tons of people have filed for exemptions for various reasons & fought to get exempted, but another 70% just don't show up reliably. And these companies are powerless to change that. Good luck threatening your actions, chums.
Even the highest tech company on the planet- perhaps especially the highest tech company on the planet- is going to have a hard as fuck time actually making the threat real, is going to keep looking like idiots. There's just no cause. There's no carrot, no sales-pitch why, no belief it's useful, and no threat imaginable that can actually scare compliance. This is a huge story, and I greatly look forward to the once-almighty power-structure being ongoingly roundly ignored. The old corporate hierarchy of control is dead, ring a ding a ding dong.
Could you link to a peer reviewed study concluding that?
Just to point out one potentially complicating factor Dr. Robert Lustig's work appears to show that our diets increasingly include processed foods which are strongly associated with health problems including weight gain and metabolic disease. So if you can completely avoid institutional food such as served at company canteens and figure out and stick to a good diet then maybe. Even then it seems like the stigma is just sloppiness that results in perfectly respectable contributions to society not being recognized.
Early on I made a habit out of becoming friends with fat people I met because their exposure to social stigma tended to make them strong as individuals.
If anything it seems like the person who is addicted to something that should be stigmatized is you.
My wife and I do this regardless of mood: Each night during our moments of quiet time together, we talk about a few things that happened during the previous 12 hours that we're grateful for. This has become one of the best parts of the day for us.
I agree that there are pros and cons to remote work, and that it should be possible to have a frank discussion about where the balance lies.
However, that is sadly irrelevant to this news item, as Musk isn't banning remote work because of any logical consideration of its merits. He's banning remote work because he's an authoritarian micromanager who believes that workers are to be treated like cattle.
I'm not going to bother with the conspiratorial bits beyond to say that Machines as the Measure of Men is a book you might find interesting to engage with. The precolumbian Americas are a fundamentally alien continent that evolved separately from Eurasia. Europeans, explorers and scholars alike, had fundamental misunderstandings of how differently societies can evolve and judged them by how similar they were to European societies. Not surprisingly, entirely alien societies evolved a bit differently and get misjudged harshly on that mistaken basis.
However, to engage with your position in good faith, it's worth going through the sorts of things Indigenous American societies were incredibly advanced at. Let's talk list some fun facts about American urbanism:
* Teotihuacan during its heyday was one of the largest cities on earth.
* Some modern cities like Tucson have continuous urban habitation stretching back to before the founding of Rome.
* Tenochtitlan was equal to or larger in size than any city of Western Europe at the time of contact. Other cities like Cusco were merely "extremely large" by European standards.
* The Valley of Mexico at contact was one of the most densely populated and urbanized regions on earth, far exceeding anything in Europe at the time.
* One of the largest residential structures at approximately the size of the modern Kremlin is Pueblo Bonito in modern New Mexico. By room numbers (though not sheer area), later Rio Grande pueblos would rival Versailles.
* Parts of modern Chandler and Mesa, AZ, as well as most of Southwestern Colorado have approximately the same population density today as in precolumbian times.
As an archaeologist I don't think any of these are particularly meaningful metrics (or that comparative work is all that useful), they're just fun. I could probably go longer with other areas and facts, but it gets boring quickly. More meaningful would be discussions of agricultural intensity or resource efficiency or systemic resilience. American societies were phenomenally competitive on these sorts of metrics. They constructed the largest irrigation networks in the world, achieved per-acre calorie densities that wouldn't be seen again until fertilizer and intensive automation were invented in the 1950s, and practiced agriculture in some of the most arid locations on the planet, where Eurasians never succeeded.
This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically:
“We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.”
I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people, myself (sadly) included. I don’t think I or any of my peers fully grasp what we’re missing and how isolated we truly are. I think we as a cohort had very good reasons for participating in that change, such as me (an LGBT person) leaving the Catholic church I was raised in rather than bury that other part of myself to fit in. The problem is that I replaced it with nothing, and I think the same pattern has repeated across many other people and many other traditions. The temptation is to suggest MeetUps and other things built to connect people, but those suggested replacements don’t come with the same assumption of trust built in like many traditional organizational and family ties do.
...
On this specific case, the sourcer who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour. We are scrubbing the sourcer’s records to ensure she did not contact anyone else.
...
From: Shona Brown (Google VP of Human Resources)
Appropriate response. Please make a public example of this termination within the group. Please also make it a very strong part of new hire training for the group. I want it clear that we have a zero-tolerance policy for violating our policies. This should (hopefully) prevent future occurrences.
From Eric Schmidt:
Steve, as a followup we investigated the recruiter’s actions and she violated our policies. Apologies again on this and I’m including a portion of the email I received from our head of recruiting [Arnnon Geshuri—M.A.]. Should this ever happen again please let me know immediately and we will handle. Thanks !! Eric
From Steve Jobs:
:)
From Sergei Brin:
Wow, Steve used a smiley. God, I never got one of those.
To summarize this thread (HN is still the best place to get IOS tips and tricks):
Three ways to move the cursor, from most reliable to least:
1. Hold down space bar and you'll enter a mode where moving your finger moves the cursor.
2. Drag it from its current location to a new location. This gets finicky, especially if you move your finger out of the text area; the cursor will move to the end of the text, but the highlighted bar that represents where you want to place the cursor will move around on the last line of the text. If there are non-text elements (images, etc.) in the block, then this will be unpredictable in where the cursor ends up. Also your finger blocks the text and there's no more magnifying glass.
3. Single tap in the text to place the cursor -- but if you tap on a misspelled word, it will go into "suggest replacements" mode. Double tap selects a word, and triple tap selects a paragraph.
To select all, you have to have a free cursor (nothing selected) and tap on the cursor itself. To avoid accidentally double-tapping (and thus selecting a word instead of bringing up the context menu) you have to make sure that you wait a beat before tapping again.
To paste (most to least reliable):
1. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor.
2. Enter the select all menu above and tap on the cursor (same caveats) and one of the options will be paste. But very often the second tap will either activate a double-tap (and thus select a word) or move the cursor a little bit, making a precise paste difficult.
I mostly wanted to point out that baseball cards are a natural and historical point of comparison, but I agree that loot boxes are have moved past their predecessors. They've rolled together the tactics of CCGs, MMOs, and casinos into something thoroughly unholy.
From CCGs and even baseball cards, we obviously get artificial rarity and the basic Skinner box experience. From MMOs, we get scheduled rewards to draw players back, player-bound prizes that can't go to an aftermarket like cards, and unconstrained on-screen purchasing. From gambling, we get secondary currencies for fluid spending, the lights-and-sounds opening experience designed to make bad outcomes feel rewarding, almost-got-it visuals like a one-off reel, and banned-in-casinos tactics like scheduling wins based on money spent.
The results are genuinely alarming. I used to think these fears were overblown and 'whales' were mostly people with spare cash, but then I started to see kids interacting with freemium games. It's a distillation of decades of cash-extraction tactics, aimed at children or at distracted adults, and delivered by a vector that's constantly accessible. Honestly, it's one of the best arguments I've seen that people can be systematically harmed by access to products even without physical addiction or health damage.
TL;DR -> Please give Syncthing a try, it does just what it says on the tin and with no fuss once setup.
In the beginning, there was the 3.5" floppy disk, trudged along in my backpack in its little box with the 4 blank ones (which only ever got used by the slackers who forgot their own), used for little notes on the single README.txt featuring a .LOG at the top so each time I opened it, Notepad would insert the time/date.
Then along came the 1GB Kingston DataTraveller flash drive, what an amazing device! It held not only that increasingly read-only README.txt file, but also a portable knock-off of Onenote 2003 which name I forget (Agilix? Wikidpad? I no longer remember)
Then in 2012, Dropbox rolled into my life and I was in hog heaven, getting up to 5G from various referrals before moving in 2013 to Skydrive (now Onedrive) because a recent HTC purchase included 25GB of free storage space in addition to the already commodious 7GB(!) of free sync space. Clearly I want to be offline first, so I'll keep syncing the briefcase on the flashdrive (now a 4GB SanDisk) and carry that last floppy disk...after all if I still have an IBM USB floppy drive, might as well carry the disk right?
Fast forward several years. The 1GB and 4GB flash drive are keeping each other company in the retirement home of the electronics drawer, ready at a moment's notice to hand me a zipped up copy of Sim City 3000 or Timone and Pumba's Jungle Arcade or other such digital hoarder file from old CDs I dare not read any more but still want their contents.
In my pocket is a whopping 32GB Samsung stainless steel drive, and in my bag where the floppy disk used to live in honor is now a SIXTY-FREAKING-FOUR GB SanDisk extreme pro flash drive featuring Hiran's boot CD, DBAN, Ghost, Kali Linux, Peppermint OS, and more at the touch of a fingertip.
But the files? The briefcase has been synced oh, 4 months ago now? These days I don't plug it in as much, the old habit of plugging it in to work, home devices as soon as I log in long gone. Why do that when I can use Syncthing, an amazing tool that syncs the files with any and all devices however you want to slice n dice em. All you gotta do is introduce them with a handshake and boom, files are synced all over the wire, automatically and without being uploaded to Google's, Microsoft's, or Apple's cloud servers for heuristic analysis and advertising targeting.
I have arrived at file portability nirvana, and it is with Syncthing.
It's not just media, but the education system as well. More educated people are significantly more, not less likely to fail Intellectual-Turing-Tests about people with opposing views. i.e. far from increasing openness to experience, education itself is functioning much like indoctrination into a fundamentalist religion! The effect starts already at a High-School level and becomes worse and worse as educational attainment rises:
Guinness World Records was purchased by an entertainment company in 2001 and it's been a shitshow ever since. They ditched the old doorstopper reference book in favor of a big line of glossy picturebooks that contain only a few hundred records on a single subject each. They make up contrived records specifically for whatever's cool at the moment just to get mentioned in articles like this one, for free advertising.
I see them a lot in gaming articles, with shit like "Most voiced lines of dialogue in a single-player RPG" (Fallout: New Vegas) and "Longest unbroken cutscene sequence" (Metal Gear Solid 4). Nobody applied for these records; someone at Guinness researches popular games to find any random statistic that might be unique. My guess is that's what happened here--someone decided that vegetarianism is hot right now and went looking for records, without too much concern for their relevance or accuracy.
The culture has changed a lot. Geek originally described loners with unreasonable passion and knowledge about a specific niche. Now it's a codeword for capitalist cattle. It's the Big Bang Theory crowd that turned consumerism and brand loyalty into a point of pride: I wonder what Nietzsche would say about that.
I finished reading Ben Franklin's autobiography earlier this year. He was notorious for sparking (and usually winning) debates with the people around him. After getting some negative feedback from a friend regarding just how insufferable he was to be around, he adopted the Socratic method of asking questions so that people would see their own folly.
Eventually, it got to the point where his acquaintances and coworkers would refuse to answer even simple questions of his, out of fear that he'd follow up with more questions that would prove them to be incompetent or illogical.
He later changed his methods to something you might read about in a book like How to Win Friends and Influence People. Rather than leading people to see the logical error of their ways, he moved toward displaying much more diffidence, which allowed others to save face when changing their opinions. Phrases like "certainly X" and "undoubtedly Y" became "If I'm not mistaken, X" and "I imagine that Y."
That change worked out well for him throughout the course of his career in winning many rich and powerful people (along with ordinary citizens, of which he was one) to his side on various controversial issues of the day.
Another benefit was that he opened himself up to helpful suggestions and feedback as well. Most people abhor argumentation, and will allow overly-confident people to persist in whatever mistaken beliefs they hold. But when you display humility, others feel safer telling you what they think of your ideas.
On a side note, does anyone know if anything special was used to create the descriptive images in this blog post? They look great and describe connections between related regions really well.
> The Pixel phones have staked out the expensive-but-good market for "pure" Android snobs.
Is anyone making phones for pure Android snobs that don't brainlessly copy all of Apple's attention-grab ideas? I really want an easily-rootable pure-Android device, but I need it to have a goddamn headphone jack. No ugly notch would be nice, too, and maybe a user-replaceable battery (yes, I realize the ship has sailed on that one).
For strength training, I can only recommend the "minimalist routine" from the bodyweightfitness subreddit[1]. Basically, push-ups, rows, lunges and planks. Works all major muscle groups, needs very little to no material, and will not take more than a few minutes, every other day. A good example of the 80/20 law: that and a few cardio training (can be as simple as walking everytime you are given the opportunity) does not seem to be a lot, but it's way better than nothing.
As a developer, what should I do if I actually want to do that? Because I get a lot of satisfaction out of massaging messy wads of data into a clean, uniform, accessible form. Is there a job title or something I should look for?
I have a theory that there's basically two types of disagreements, disagreements on definitions, and disagreements on value systems.
In this case Microsoft values downplaying this issue, so when that is at the top of their value system their decisions should make sense following that.
Since this is just a pet theory I'm very interested to hear critiques on it.
Disagreements on definition are a little bit easier, because then you can just talk about the definitions and resolve your differences there... For example let's say IDK You're trying to sort out how to design a software system, and everyone is speaking in terms of design patterns, but they haven't yet spelled out the details of what those designed patterns are, then that could probably lead to a lot of confusion if when you say A I think of A', and another person is thinking of A''.