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alexjplant
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"Vell, alexjplant's just zis guy, you know?"
If you need to contact me my e-mail is {{ .FirstName }}@{{ .FirstName}}{{ .LastName }}.org.
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meet.hn/city/32.7174202,-117.162772/San-Diego
- What sort? Inquiring minds and all that... like a "Good Witch of the North"? Or a Hermione Granger type? Or the kind that own crystal shops that serve tea from renewed storefronts in quaint coastal towns?
- > This is very accurate to me. In the last few years I've been learning ukulele / guitar / bass / mandolin / banjo, and it took a LOT of time and practice before I could control my muscles well enough to use less effort. When you're starting you just don't have the necessary dexterity, and it's very easy as an expert to forget about those early days, especially if you learned very young.
Every time I learn a new instrument I'm reminded of the fact that many things just need to be drilled into your brain stem. I know how to play piano and sight read music for it but I can't do either because I haven't put the seat time in to do it in real time. I'm learning (electric) upright bass right now and there are a dozen technique issues I've noticed that I have to fix but I can only focus on a few of them at once.
Putting forth zero effort is how one ends up sloppy and stagnant. You instead need to be aware of your cognitive and parasympathetic bandwidth and how to utilize each to practice to a meaningful end.
- "Whiplash" uses jazz music as a plot device - it has about as much to do with it as "Hackers" does with computers. I've never even played jazz (let alone at the level depicted in the film) and every five or ten minutes of watching it I found myself exclaiming incredulously at the seemingly ridiculous bullshit I was bearing witness to. My instincts were correct; the internet is rife with actual jazz musicians talking about this film's numerous creative liberties taken in service of its plot derivative of a sports flick.
Any opinion of actual jazz musicians formed on the basis of this film can be safely disregarded ab initio. Music snobs exist, but that movie is full of strawmen. A real shame as it was otherwise very well-executed but stuff like the finger-bleeding scene ripped straight from a Bryan Adams song does it no favors.
- I've played in bar bands (doing covers) for 12 years now. My current project is going on hiatus due to some members leaving and us having to find new ones. We played our last show very recently and were talking about how we have an actual fanbase that's grown through friends, spontaneous discovery, and social media primarily through my bandmates' doing. Before the show and between sets I'm always going out of my way to do something in service of the performance instead of talking to people in the crowd that are watching us.
It then occurred to me that a decent part of the reason that I perform live is a selfish one - on some level I'd rather demonstrate social utility by being a human jukebox than have to interact with people normally. Apparently I'd rather chug water and double-check the setlist after getting off stage than drink a beer and introduce myself to people. As ironic as it sounds there's a certain security to being on stage that insulates you from having to hang out with people while still scratching the itch to go out.
Maybe I'm psychologizing myself too much but it's a thought. Definitely something I'm going to work on regardless.
- No, I implied that implementing pub/sub with just a select statement is silly because it is. Your implementation accounts for the downfalls of this approach with smart design using a message queue and intelligent locking semantics. Parent of my comment was glib and included none of this.
- Ah yes, and every consumer should just do this in a while (true) loop as producers write to it. Very efficient and simple with no possibility of lock contention or hot spots. Genius, really.
- I used to meow back to my cat when he was younger for vocal modulation and pitch practice (lots of minor seconds and perfect fourths). This might have been a mistake as he's now very talkative, particularly when I'm on the phone.
- Satire is dead. A toilet company killed it.
- For those interested Deep Purple apparently originated the term "Space Truckin'" with their identically-titled song [1]. I'd be astounded if there weren't a copy of "Made in Japan" lying around somebody's apartment when they made "Aliens".
- I think you meant to reply to a different comment. I talked about dividing one's life up into periods based on experience and themes, not about linguistic revisionism or Javascript frameworks.
- I sat down and divided my own life into thematic epochs not long ago. Mine are split differently and more specifically to my own lived experience but I, too, arrived at the fact that I'm entering #5 in my mid-30s. Interesting coincidence!
- > We will have to infantilize people until their 30s now?
People already pick and choose who they feel sympathy for and give a pass to on the basis of their personal experiences, belief system, and social proximity. Think of how many, for instance, ridicule politicians for being too saintly and enabling or mean and without empathy then give their friends and family a pass for the exact same behavior. They'll get angry with celebrities for things that they allegedly did then shrug off a driver running a red light and nearly killing them because they "don't take things personally". Addicts are a blight on society until it's somebody's child or brother or sister in which case they just need help. Et cetera ad infinitum.
People (you and I included) are fickle. This changes nothing.
- > house prices [...] need to go down heavily.
As a layperson I have a feeling that's not going to happen. The working class has too much wealth tied up in their homes because US society and the government have encouraged people to treat it as a store of wealth instead of a box that shields them from the weather. People talk constantly about "getting on the property ladder", "buying more land because they aren't making more of it", "having a landlord side hustle", etc. A house is a lot more tangible than stocks so people without knowledge of finance feel much better about investing in one (understandably so - also forget about Social Security). Combine this with associated government tax subsidies and mortgage underwriting programs and you've basically created a situation where home prices can't do anything but go up.
Look at the amortization table for the proposed 50 year mortgage: borrowers wouldn't be making a dent in the principal for a good 10 or 15 years. The underlying assumption here is that people would make money via home price appreciation, i.e. speculation, not from creating an actual store of value. We already kicked this can once when the 30-year mortgage became a thing 60 years ago.
Of course one can't draw the current trend line into infinity because of affordability but I highly doubt it'll go down appreciably. I also don't know enough to have a solution to this problem - any ideas?
- "Hard" by whose definition? I had to implement those in MIPS assembly and write a hash table in x86 assembly in school but I don't think I could do that today without a good deal of refresh. I'd venture to say that most software developers today wouldn't even know where to begin because most software written today targets a VM that doesn't expose pointer arithmetic.
- Years ago some enterprising individual made a Flash version of the non-existent computer game in "Big" [1]. It's just a single room but the fact that somebody went to such lengths is amazing.
[1] https://www.kongregate.com/games/bomtoons/cavern-of-the-evil...
- ECMAScript is an order of magnitude more complicated than Go by virtually every measure - length of language spec, ease of parsing, number of context-sensitive keywords and operators, etc.
> AI vibe coding is an accelerant on this style of not knowing why something works but seeing what you want on the screen.
I've been saying this exact thing for years now. It also does the whole CRUD app "copy, paste, find, replace from another part of the application" workflow for building new domains very well. If you can bootstrap a codebase with good architectural practices and tests then Claude Code is a productivity godsend for building business apps.