- I own a MP01 that replaced a Nokia 105 that got lost in the Berghain after 12 years of service. I regret buying the Punkt. It costs more than double than the Nokia and is worse in almost every dimension. It is all form over function, with various obvious UX issues. I would not buy from this company again.
- I really enjoyed the piece also, in spite of the off-putting writing style.
It reminds me of the Epicurean hierarchy of desires, the genius Epicurus had it figured out more then a couple of millenia ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism
The thing about "apps for one" actually resonated with me quite a bit.
The last year I've struggled finding freelance work and I've found myself with more time (and less money) that I would like. I feel guilty, because one side of me feels like I should have spent this time to learn ML or to make an app that makes passive income. The thing is: I have no interest in making "apps" to make money. I wouldn't even know what app to make, because there is no quotidian problem for which I think an app would make my life easier. On the contrary, I don't have a smartphone and apps are making my life harder, as we move towards a world where apps are expected for everything. But instead, I have made a couple of games for my girlfriend's birthdays, and I also made her web portfolio, all forms, I guess, of "apps for one" made for love. Other than that, perhaps, I enjoy tuning my Linux system (recently migrated from Xmonad to Hyprland), a form of making, perhaps, an app for one, in the only tech device that still feels like I can control instead of it trying to control myself. Other than that, I use my time to go to the gym and sometimes to paint or DJ or just party, even though I often spend on Hacker News, Youtube, Wikipedia and other media way more time that I would like to.
So all in all, I find it difficult to write code these days with the joy of when I was younger, and it is hard to motivate myself if there's no money involved, with the exception of those gestures of love. It saddens me, because I believe it is such a powerful and beautiful skill. But I just find the current state of world and how "technology" is used to extract capital out of all human relationships rather depressing. The current wave of "AI" only makes the problem worse, and adds an dark sense of impending doom...
- Does this mean that possession / carrying of GBL in a public context (e.g. at party) is also being made illegal and can get you sent to prison?
- I have a theory (actually I wanted at some point to write more seriously about it) about how GDP also expands by consuming life itself. If you're burnt out, or don't have time to see friends and are depressed have to pay for therapy, GDP grows. If you don't have time to care for your children so you have to keep them busy with million classes, or paid for caretaking, GDP expands. If you don't have time or confidence to meet people IRL and have to pay for Tinder, GDP expands. If you don't have time to cook (even if you enjoy it) so UberEats all the time, GDP expands. When you replace public services by extractivist and more inefficient private ones (see healthcare, education) GDP often grows. The list goes on and on. The more every aspect of human existence is replace by a transaction in the market place, the more GDP grows. We replace a variety of motivations to do and to be based of human relationships and affection, by cold self-interested exchanges between strangers.
GDP is a fucked up way to look at life. It's go to way to look at whether a country is doing good, but it's consuming our environment and our own sanity in so many ways.
That's one of the reasons why I think that actually limiting the working hours (bringing it down to 30, and eventually to 20 hours a week) should be one of the main agenda points for this coming century. It's important for our environment, but also for our own sanity.
One could argue that given a sufficiently large GDP, one can make the individual choice to earn less and have more time. But that's sadly not how things work, since having more workforce available also devalues work relative to subsistence goods (e.g., you can't afford a roof without a full time job). Also, individualism is such a powerful ideology in a market driven economy. Maximizing individualism itself can help you get ahead in the marketplace, and spreads through society via marketing, private media. At some point, we even stop seeing how to behave differently than to maximize our own profit. We need democratic instruments outside of the marketplace to steer our society in a way that improves our lives, regardless of what that does to GDP.
- That's not how you compute yearly earnings from a consulting rate. We consultants need to negotiate contracts, do marketing, accounting, etc. We get sick, we go on vacation and sometimes you're just hustling for clients. Also, that day that you're completely unmotivated, or moody, or hangover, or it was election day and the news are crazy, and you don't write a line of code in the whole day? You still get paid when on a salary, but you don't bill that to a client. 200 * 32 * 42 gives you a much better estimate for a highly productive individual.
- Came here to mention this. I'm shocked when people use YouTube to rip stuff. Soulseek is a remnant of the web 1.0 era and Napster times. It feels my heart with joy that it still exists. Also people that use it are mostly djs and have great collections that is a joy to explore, it's like being invited into someone's house, not being fed by a heartless algorithm. Plus the 1on1 model works great these days for music since internet is so fast, and it's a security against the lawyer mafia letters that you can get in Germany for using torrents.
I also spend like 300 to 500 EUR a year on Bandcamp so I don't feel bad about this. Plus a lot of stuff there is just hard to find elsewhere. In times where we keep losing agency through cloud-enshitification, AI-inscrutability and technofeudalism, Soulseek and its community brings me hope.
- But the intent of that email is not to unblock the IP, but to put pressure on Cloudfare to stop giving service to the allegedly pirate sites.
- The hardware may last but there is planned obsolescence via software. You stop getting OS upgrades after 5 to 7 years and soon after most other apps. That alone I consider so wasteful and infuriating. My Linux machines don't ever have the problem, and at least Lenovo makes hardware as durable or more than Apple. I'm on Framework now and I hope it will last as long. I also have a Mac from 2020 or 2021 (last Intel Macbook pro) and I read they're already stopping OS upgrades.
- The screenshot in the OP article show already quite a few issues. It takes a trained eye to be able to articulate a lot of the issues. I feel like Gmome is designed by professional designers but KDE mostly by developers. I do share the sentiment that Gnome is often too rigid, but the design is coherent, consistent and aesthetically well articulated. I use Hyprland with mostly Gnome apps (have considered Niri too!)
But I don't mean to trash KDE. Some people don't care about that padding or visual layering or whatever but do care about the extra options and features. At the end of the day, I'm just happy that we're on a platform where all these approaches have their space and people can chose and build commnities that grow tools that adapt to their own sensibilities and needs.
KDE is great, Gnome is great, free software is great. Mac and Windows are hell.
- My music collection is 1.2TB. Most VPS only offer 40-100GB on the cheap tiers. For now I just keep it local...
Any suggestions for storage oriented VPS that I can use for this use case and other backup/storage use cases?
- The parent comment just shows how most people do not understand how inequal the US actually is. I'd recommend to try this: https://wid.world/income-comparator/US/
If you make a yearly gross salary of 100K you're already in the top 11%. With 200K you're in the top 3%. Inequality also leads to social segregation, which means that we live in bubbles where most people are "like us" and it's very difficult to see how privileged we actually are.
Read Piketty's "Capital in the XXI century" to learn more about how crazy inequal the world, but specially the US, is becoming. Phenomena like Trump are easier to understand when taking this into account.
- Interesting. This is a problem with the english language, where verbs and adjectives are often the same. It would not happen in Spanish, where "Abrir" (Infinitive) is different than "Abierto" (adjective).
I guess this could be avoided by using "Do open" or "Is open". Would this sound off to a native speaker?
- The immutable data-structures library Immer provides such type:
- The post peaks with this example is this one:
That they compare, with the "uglier":bool usersHairColorMatchesThisMonthsAdsColour = _user.hair == HairColour::Red; bool userFeetSizeFitsInShoe = _user.feetSize <= _requestedShoe.size; bool shoePriceFitsInUserBudget = _requestedShoe.price <= BudgetHelpers::Calculator(_user); bool shoeIsProbablyOkayForUser = usersHairColorMatchesThisMonthsAdsColour && userFeetSizeFitsInShoe && shoePriceFitsInUserBudget; if(shoeIsProbablyOkayForUser)
I very much prefer the latter, I'm sorry (except it needs some new lines, of course). It performs better (that `BudgetHelper::Calculator` doesn't look very cheap ;) but crucially it is, to me personally, more "readable". First, I find a comment easier to read than a variable name, particularly when you use the not so readable dromedaryCaseToCrambleWordsInLongSentences. Thus, a variable adds no value when it's only used once (arguably, it adds more noise, since one has to go twice through the same text). And it is often debatable how a programmers poor translation of code into English adds any value: in fact, I find `_user.feetSize <= _requestedShoe.size` to be way more succint, precise and easier to parse than `userFeetSizeFitsInShoe`.// this months ad campaign color is red if(_user.hair == HairColor::Red && _user.feetSize <= _requestedShoe.size && _requestedShoe.price <= BudgetHelpers::Calculator(_user))We really need to get over this school of thought that "the more wordy your variables the more readable" because it is simply not true. You don't have to go all the other way to the other end and write code using greek letters like in math. Meet somewhere in the middle, be aware of context and use the tools of the language (e.g. lexical scoping) to your power.
Unlike many of these bloggers want us to believe, you can't just boil "readability" down to some simple universal rules, and only experience makes the master. Taste, preference, purpose and context take a big part. As such, I find it useless to talk about "readable" code: readable for who? A law text, a maths paper, a school maths book, a user manual, a tutorial, a novel, a HN comment... they may all be written in English and with great skill in consideration for their "readability" by their target audiences, yet manifest completely different styles even when discussing the same topics.
For me, I like my code like I often enjoy most good writting: succint and precise. Wordy variables that add no value or abstraction are of little use to me.
- That's so frustrating. The biggest AI company in the world and their anti-spam system is so stupid? Really lowers your expectations on state of the art tech.
- I did run my own server with properly setup DKIM and SPF and all. Gmail and Hotmail would still mark my emails as spam whenever they felt like it. Sometimes, even for emails that were a reply to an email coming from their own servers. I almost lost a client because of that once. Maybe it was because of the IP range (I was in a cheap Scaleway server)?
At some point I just accepted reality and paid for a third party email server (Runbox) but the situation with the monopoly of these giants marking as spam anything they don't manage made just really sad.
- I was very disappointed with this book. To be fair, I haven't even finish it.
I was expecting something philosophical, this is, something that actually connect the philosophy and software design disciplines. Outside of the title however, there is no philosophy in this book. Just general typical practical "good practice" tips of the kind you find in blog posts, without much empirical nor philosophical discussion for them.
- Yes. Motion blur is temporal interpolation, this is, it's a way of representing what happens "in between frames". The shorter the time between frames, the more subtle the effects of interpolation (like the higher the resolution of an image, the less blurry it becomes in between pixels).
- I agree with you.
When I got into Nix and Guix I tried both and I leaned towards Guix because "it's scheme" but ended up sticking to Nix because of maturity, Darwing support and it being way more performant.
In the end I realized that I actually prefer Nix as a language. I like that it's a very simple and limited language, with, for example, no way of performing side-effects. It is tailored towards it's purpose and, while not perfect, it does the job well.
As other point out, Nixpkgs and the Nix toolchain in general just uses very weird names for everything, plus the docs. That's the difficult bit. It's slightly improving over time.
- How did you do that? I'm interested...
- Yes! I find it so ironic, in a country that prides itself for it's stance for "privacy", that random predatory lawyers can just get from ISP's the personal details behind any IP address on the basis of potential IP infringement. It is really infuriating...
- I use stow as well, highly recommended!
- There is a very good episode about him in the last Cosmos season.
- May I ask what's your specialty and daily rate?
- I'm collaborating with this company working very much on this space: giving artists simple tools to make music that is non-linear and generative, where the artist expresses structure and composition, and the machine is the performer: https://bronze.ai
- It seems that the Graham's point (a trap in which the OP's critique falls) is that obscene riches are OK if they are not inherited. Following this logic, Hitler is better than the Queen of England because he earned his power instead of inheriting it!
In fact, the Industrial Revolution that he claims to be the last "time of entrepreneurship" created the the Dickensian's work conditions and such a strong class divide that lead to the worker's revolutions of the 19th and early 20th century, to the corresponding fascist counter-revolutions, and to two world wars. It is precisely in the following "boring time" of Keynesianism and the cold-war that the west and "the second world" experienced the highest sustainable growth period ever and that the masses had access, for the firs time, to minimally decent working conditions to create that thing we call "the middle class".
So in fact, Graham is right in that we see now again, like in the Industrial Revolution, a simultaneity of great technological disruption combined with a hegemonic neo-liberal ideology. This is leading lead a new rise of world-wide hyper-concentrated capital, job instability, more and more limited access to basic goods like housing, climate catastrophe, and a new class of capitalists that believe that they are above any sense of morality.
There is nothing to celebrate here but more of the opposite: good reason to be really scared of the future to come.
- Yes, that's quite expensive.
There is a 4G edition of the Nokia 105 which would be my next option. But I'm thinking maybe if I move to a 4G phone I'd like it to have the ability to create a wifi hotspot, which none of the cheap Nokias can.
But I dunno, I'm slowly kind of getting tired of the burner phone life... It's just getting harder and harder. I spent three months in the US this summer and it was impossible without one there, even the door of this workshop I was visiting needed a fucking app to open the door, so I did buy the cheapest Samsung (my first ever smartphone). I'm now back in Europe and using the burner phone again, I keep the smartphone for the bank app and what not. But... maybe when this new GrapheneOS device comes out this year (they promised a new non-google device with official OEM support) I may bite the bullet... Or maybe one of those ink-display devices...