antonchekhov

Nowadays, almost any news org can have journalists reporting from across the planet in real-time. But back before internet connectivity was ubuquitous, StarLink satellites, smartphones and streaming video everywhere, CNN had a few reporters who had the then-very-rare satellite phones (I think they were almost small-backpack sized) who could report from Iraq on-site during Desert Storm, and it was revolutionary. CNN's ratings went through the roof during that war, and after the war was over, it was reported they raised their ad rates over 1000%, because they had this new giant audience. It really felt like a transformation of public news media.

Can you enumerate which parties have been "harmed" by her donations, and the precise nature of the harm(s)?

If this becomes the prevailing inclination amongst most readers, Janan Ganesh (one of my most favorite commentators anywhere) at the Financial Times will have a dim professional future.

Theoretically, in this case, the agonizing "It's pouring rain, blowing cold wind in your face, kids are screaming and hitting each other, you stubbed your toe into cart and generally just having bad day" scenario making any man unable to manage the extra-harrowing effort of directing a cart a few meters into a designated space.

[..] I can't imagine how useless an unthinking AI would be at this when my own family and friends who, and this is important, _know me_, can't find anything to get me that doesn't land in the above categories

This is precisely the problem - an AI does not really "know" the recipient (set aside of what it means to "know" someone). The result is you get something just a bit more varied than the usual "He's a Guy - he'll love some Whiskey Stones, a Bacon-of-the-Month subscription, or a Beard Care Kit" advice. (Adjust for whatever target demographic.)

Acceleration by using the x86 AVX-512 extensions is especially compelling. Since ARM64 processors are becoming pervasive in server-side systems, is-there/will-there-be any optimization using the ARM64 NEON vector instructions in current or future Go versions? (The NEON instructions are 128-bit, instead of 512 bits in the AVX-512 set, but may still be useful.)

A former coworker who was a serious gun enthusiast experienced dangerously high levels of lead in his bloodstream - he had chronic headaches and other bodily pains. He visited shooting ranges several times per week, and also packed (assembled? made? I'm not sure the nomenclature) his own bullets. His doctors believe he aspirated atomized lead particulate doing so much shooting practice, and/or bullet manufacture. He underwent chelation therapy (a protocol involving taking certain medications that bind to heavy metals in the blood, and the patient excretes it out via urination) to reduce lead levels.

I use command-line tooling much more than IDEs (e.g. VS Code), so the `gh` command-line tool (https://cli.github.com) for doing most of the usual hub-oriented workflow (PR authoring, viewing issues, status updates, etc) really helps a lot - I don't have to constantly <cmd>+<tab> to my browser, and point-click-point-click through web pages so much. It would be fantastic if ersc or any other jj-centered code-sharing hub had similar tooling early on.

There is a difference between "giving" and "taking".

Back in the early '90s, I was a big fan of the C/C++ debugging library "electric fence" (written by Bruce Perens) - it was a malloc() implementation that used mmap() to set the pages of the returned buffer such that any writes in that region (and even read accesses!) caused a segfault to happen, and the program halts, so you can examine the stack. It was a godsend.

there are many languages in popular use that can do this, in many cases better than golang

I'd love to see a list of these, with any references you can provide.

I don't understand why, if the recipient of the initial detached "hello" is annoyed at the communication tax of having to acknowledge it before the querier gets to the real point of the convo, why in the "preferred" example, he/she responds to their gratitude ("ta") with a "np"? That seems like just as much pointless communication noise, only at the other end of the chat. When I say thanks to anyone in real-life verbal communication, their (usually a grunt) "no problem" adds nothing.

The J Peterman catalog is still around around (at least, online) and approaches satire in its selection of goods (mostly clothing) that assiduously conveys "casual, interesting, old-money wealth". The Elaine Benes character on "Seinfeld" worked there, and had to deal with the kooky habits of the Mr Peterman character.

Then what did your second sentence ["These are not scientific observations in any sense. What does the author do to confirm or refute her psychological theories about others?"] intend?

She's very good at telling stories, but these stories feel like fiction, not hard fact.

There was no claim of objective fact. This is a Substack piece, not a peer-reviewed submission to "Nature" journal.

Window-sharing doesn't work at all in Firefox (last several versions) on macOS 15.4; Safari works fine for Google Meet events.

"Frasier", Season 5 Episode 12:

  Niles: [walks in] Hello, Dad.  I believe we switched videotapes on 
         accident.
 Martin: Believe me, I noticed.
  Niles: Yes, there you go. [hands over video] At first I was dismayed.  
         I popped in the tape, and there was Charles Bronson blowing 
         away street trash, but I actually got into it.  It was quite 
         suspenseful.
 Martin: Yeah, well, that's the way Duke and I felt about "My Dinner 
         With Andre."  Talk about suspense! [fake, dramatic 
         anticipation] Will they order dessert?  Will they leave a good 
         tip? [walks to chair and sits]

It's very much like an echo of the old Wall Street Journal Opinion motto "Free Men and Free Markets".

JD Salinger took a lot of heat over his reticence to publish any more of his writings after Catcher In the Rye and the Glass family stories. In 1974, he responded to the NY Times, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work."

I don't remember who originally stated it, but there is an old axiom that "There are three stages of Reading: 1. Infantile - to learn about the world, 2. Adolescent - to learn about oneself, and 3. Adult - to read simply for enjoyment".

I think a lot of the current market for (adult) books reflects the second stage. It would be interesting to ask the person(s) sitting next to you on the next plane ride why they are reading, e.g. Malcolm Gladwell vs Dan Brown vs Ian McEwan.

"other people's important people" is a very astute phrase - one has to see the value in that concept in order to understand the deceased's survivors that you think you already know. I've been to a few events where some folks were flabbergasted to discover different fresh aspects of the deceased - "what the...? He/she was tight with that crowd?!"

Coincidentally there is literally the novel "The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton - published in 1905, it's an excellent late-Victorian/Gilded-Age period novel about the slow downfall of Lily Bart, a woman who was in New York's high society, then through a series of unfortunate events and social reproaches, descended into lonely poverty. It was quite influential at the time, portraying the materialism and shallowness of the moneyed crowd.

New startup idea: manufacture a hard-plastic spiky attachment, shaped like a tubular hair-brush that I can simply screw onto the base of my Sonicare toothbrush, then stand upside down into the brewing carafe of my Oxo cold-brew setup. The Sonicare's built-in 2 minute timer may have to be activated twice, for a full brew.

On a much more severe scale, this is clearly the message that the Kremlin lavishly displayed of the initial treatment of the suspects involved in the Moscow Crocus Hall shootings/bombing - the results of severe torture send an unmistakable message of "Do not be tempted to try this (terrorism/attempted revolution" to the citizenry, with the implicit message that their very-short remaining lifespan will be very painful.

It's been many years since I've had to use an Oracle db, but they definitely allowed SQL developers to forcibly specify a query-plan - called "query hints", wherein you could specify it to prefer using (or avoiding) certain indexes, certain join-strategies (hash, loop, etc) - this was done via comments immediately before the SQL query - see https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B13789_01/server.101/b10752/hints...

Postgresql doesn't have this, however, I've rarely missed this feature - tables with good indexes, regular db hygiene, etc, almost always perform excellently. The query planner is very, very smart nowadays.

I've heard "findings" (ab)used as a synonym for this as well.

No amount of formal quality process can defend against business pressure and incentives to hack the same system.

"Culture eats Strategy for breakfast" -- Peter Drucker (purportedly)

“To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim." ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

People forget how vast and sparse the interior American West is; the New York City metro area has a larger population than the whole Mountain timezone.

The overall tone is bloodless, in a relentlessly smooth, confident style. The articles on the news site Axios.com have a similar style - relaxing to read at first, but feel bereft of any convictions after a while.

"To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim." -- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray