- Yeah, "no pain no gain" is probably the worst advice I've ever received. It encourages sedentary people to go hard for a week and then quit, which is the exact opposite of what works: starting with consistent easy sessions and adding progressive overload.
Dynomight has a good blog post about this[0], but applied to running rather than resistance training.
[0] https://dynomight.net/2021/01/25/how-to-run-without-all-the-...
- I think you're misunderstanding me: the proposal of a carbon tax is fine, but if you're the person who spearheads it then it's most effective to already be individual acting. That way, you can't be accused of hypocrisy.
You can't support the tax as effectively unless you prove by your actions that you believe in the cause. While individual action won't directly solve the problem, failing to take individual action might jeopardise your ability to support collective action.
- Is that surprising? Big tech selects for people with few ties to a real life community (because they're willing to move to the Bay Area/NY/Seattle/etc.), no particular moral objections to the work, and enough brainpower to rationalise anything.
Also, religion and philosophy are alike in that some people have a rich inner life that they are not willing to share with most of the world. Your acquaintance who works for a defence contractor is not going to explain why he believes propping up the Pax Americana (or helping ICE deport migrants, or working for a social media company, or any other example of something you don't like) is morally right unless he feels safe in doing so.
- This is an oversimplification. Collective action is driven by a mass of individual beliefs that are strong enough to suppress bad actors. If you are one of the bad actors, it's more difficult to force the other bad actors to stop because they can accuse you of hypocrisy.
See e.g. Al Gore taking flights to speaking engagements about climate change. From one perspective, this is an effective tool and probably even carbon-negative if it leads to effective change. On another level, why is a guy with so many frequent flier miles telling me to fly less? Why is a rich guy who can eat the cost of a carbon tax telling me my plane tickets will cost more? Etc.
I am reminded of the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" refrain, which is sometimes used by people who don't like capitalism to justify taking the absolute least ethical option available.
- We grew up with an '80s Victa, but it was one of the super 600 slashers with a newer 5hp engine. He probably didn't have a slasher, but the rest of their lineup used similar engines and weren't especially underpowered.
If his model was anything like ours, a hedgehog could probably crawl between the blade disc (not the blades but the thing they're attached to) and the chassis and get itself wedged in there.
- Hopefully this conversation plays out a million times whenever someone decides to make sentence boundaries harder to recognise for no reason, and together we can all make a difference.
- maDe iT muCH WORse for aNyone wITH A viSUAL OR COgniTive impaiRment bY trEATinG capItalIsation as UNImporTanT.
- I hate it when people do this. I refuse to write Bell Hooks or E. E. Cummings without capitals. Even though it's vanishingly unlikely, I hope they both read this from beyond the grave and think about what they've done to reading comprehension.
Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase will only grow worse.
- I'm not going to put customer data on a USB-3 SSD sitting on my desk. Having a small database doesn't mean you can ignore physical security and regulatory compliance, particularly if you've still got reasonable cash flow. Just as one example, some of our regulatory requirements involve immutable storage - how am I supposed to make an SSD that's literally on my desk immutable in any meaningful way? S3 handles this in seconds. Same thing with geographically distributed replicas and backups.
I also disagree that the ongoing maintenance, observability, and testing of a replicated database would take a few hours to set up and then require zero maintenance and never ping me with alerts.
- Our AWS spend is something like $160/month. Want to come build bare metal database infrastructure for us for $3/day?
- I can't talk about staff costs, but as someone who's self-hosted Postgres before, using RDS or Supabase saves weeks of time on upgrades, replicas, tuning, and backups (yeah, you still need independent backups, but PITRs make life easier). Databases and file storage are probably the most useful cloud functionality for small teams.
If you have the luxury of spending half a million per year on infrastructure engineers then you can of course do better, but this is by no means universal or cost-effective.
- You're only expected to crash 500 or so times per 100 million miles as the base rate[0]. If you were impaired enough to have 2x or 3x the risk of crashing then it's entirely possible that you wouldn't crash, or that other factors would play a larger role.
[0] https://www.friedmansimon.com/faqs/how-common-are-car-accide...
- I still don't get it. External API calls aren't deterministic. You're still left with the choice between making them idempotent or potentially performing an action twice (or more!), and I don't see how durable execution helps you.
- Given that most PhD students pay for their earlier education and then do underpaid grunt work as part of their program, the US should already be reaping the benefits. It's only failing to reap them in the sense that more could be gained if they stayed, and that a citizen would be more likely to stay.
- I know you know everything I'm about to write, but I read a lot of dubious quality fiction. It needs to be made clear that if the butler "strides" up to Helen, then I, the reader, am expecting him to eject her from the party, tell her that her car is on fire, or something equally dramatic. The writer can subvert this expectation, but must at least acknowledge that it exists. The butler can stride up to Helen with a self-important sniff and welcome her to the house, but he can't just stride up for no reason: the striding must be explained and it must be relevant to the rest of the story.
Conveying meaning is the whole problem here. An unexpected word choice is a neon sign saying "This is important!" and it disappoints the reader if it is not.
- Can you explain a bit more about what you mean by a limit on how much code an event loop can handle? What's the limit, numerically, and which units does it use? Are you running out of CPU cache?
- Extract the concrete predictions, evaluate them as true/false/indeterminate, and grade the user on the number of true vs false?
- AI reviews have the benefit of making me feel like an idiot in one bullet point and then a genius in the next.
- I understand merge sort enough to just jump in and write it. It does require a little more space and thought than bubble sort, though.
You can absolutely reconsolidate and budget your way out of debt, though. Or budget your way to having a savings account when you're earning the median income.