ashark

I'm not following how the linked story relates to Lorde. Probably there's some news I've missed. Could you fill me (us) in?

Also the schools. Houses in the our city in safe-by-city-standards neighborhoods are not only way more expensive (and, nonetheless, smaller) than the 'burbs, they're usually served by some of the worst schools in the area. So then you're paying for private school, on top of more expensive housing. The math for living in the city doesn't work out unless you're really rich—or don't have kids. You could maybe do it with one and not hurt your wallet too much, but the costs scale quickly with 2+.

Those joke bumper stickers with the couple and the pile of money next to them instead of kids aren't wrong.

Between promoting sponsors (ads), promoting their own programs (ads), and trying to get me to give them my car (ads), it seems like my local NPR station's ~25-30% ads even when it's not pledge drive week.

I'd say that it felt like the movie wanted Rey to join Kylo. It was what it was building to. It would have fit with the taking-an-old-thing-and-twisting-it vibe of the rest of the film. The momentum of the film seemed in that moment to strain and fail against what I assume were the limits of how far off the rails JJ/Disney would let it go. It'd have taken what was already probably the 3rd most interesting and original Star Wars movie and given it a real shot at the #2 spot (A New Hope's nigh-unassailable in its #1 position, having created the phenomenon of the multi-genre pastiche film).

Up until this point, I usually would make most things from scratch and pull in libraries sparce. No big deal because my previous programs didnt need to. (Self taught programmer for 11 years.)

You can still do this with React. Some of the most-common general-purpose libraries for working with React aren't that big and could be written from scratch pretty easily. If you recognize when something's entire purpose is apparently to replicate OO features while staying "purely" functional by jumping through a series of awkward hoops, you can recall that the language you're writing in does, in fact, support OOP, and avoid the library altogether by using built-in language features (I keep seeing this in the React ecosystem and it drives me nuts).

Probably use Redux because everyone and everything expects that you are. It's easy to understand if you ignore their bad terminology and go in knowing it's just an event/messaging system, more or less. Action = event. "Action creator" = anything that dispatches an event. Reducer = your event handlers. Exactly what you'd expect from an event system with centralized event handling. Utterly mundane and non-magical. Figure out how to leverage "combineReducers" to keep your file structure sane and just go. The closest thing it has to magic going on is that when an event comes through it checks to see whether any of the refs in your "state tree" changed as a result of that event, and triggers re-renders on relevant connected view(s) (React views, in your case). That's it. Note that with a very little creativity one can decouple one's Redux code and most/all of one's business logic into its own library to share it between React and React Native.

If you use React Native, you're in for a treat if you're used to fully native cross-platform dev. It really does a great job of rounding off the many, many rough corners on Android that make it such a pain-in-the-ass to work with. Warning: the ecosystem's kinda nutty and does a bad job of keeping in sync, so avoid dependencies that directly target React Native as much as possible if you want to ever be able to, say, upgrade your React Native version without breaking everything. Pure JS libs that have no truck with React Native, good. Libs that add narrowly-scoped extra native integration for RN, usually good. Mostly JS libs that add on to React Native itself, typically just a disaster waiting to happen, no matter how nice they seem at first.

Oh, and use Typescript. For the love of god use Typescript. Just start the project with it, and never look back.

Yeah, Henry James is the novelist. William's brother. I'd call his output... mixed, but much of it's really good. Big fan of Washington Square, myself. Probably better to approach shorter novella-ish works like that, and his actual short stories (there are lots) first, and work your way up to the novels (there are also lots of those). Do not start with Daisy Miller. It's among his most famous and widely-read, but just don't.

"I want to retain my own identity. Therefore the thing I’m most anxious to avoid is any kind of work that can be considered ‘interesting’ in its own right. I want something that can’t possibly touch me. I want some big, swollen corporation that’s been bumbling along making money in its sleep for a hundred years, where they have to hire eight guys for every one job because none of them can be expected to care about whatever boring thing it is that they are supposed to be doing. I want to go into that kind of place and say, Look. You can have my body and my nice college-boy smile for so many hours a day, in exchange for so many dollars, and beyond that we’ll leave each other strictly alone."

- Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road, 1961

I don't wanna go dig through my copy to find it right now, but there's also a pretty long bit where he describes how most of the "work" that most of the "workers" at his (the character, Frank Wheeler's) firm do is making brief comments on various proposals or memos or whatever then sending them off to other people for their comments, trying to avoid being caught with the hot potato and actually having to do whatever's being proposed. They're all very good at it.

Again, written in 1961.

It doesn't take a ton of time to be way better-informed than most people on current events. Background reading of big ol' books is a lot more valuable than keeping up with the headlines every day. You can catch up on the need-to-know current events with one monthly paper you scan on a lazy Sunday morning, and maybe a weekly or monthly newsletter or two. Reading about the stuff daily is 100% not necessary.

Similarly, and especially given our two-party system in the US, following every twist and turn in a political race is pure entertainment, of exactly no more value to you or anyone else than watching soap operas. You can make an as-informed-as-it-needs-to-be decision by spending that time on building up foundational knowledge instead, then catching up on the happenings of the race and the candidates' positions an hour before you go vote.

Congress seems to be more dysfunctional now than it was in the 80's and 90's.

Electoral punishment for gaming the system to extreme levels, and even for misconduct that has no benefit for a party or candidates image or efficacy (blatant corruption, Roy Moore-type behavior [edit, 1]) has proven to be non-existent. The more various candidates and officials push, the farther it's clear they can go without punishment. Things are getting worse because they keep trying to push farther, and succeeding.

This is largely because of wedge issues—especially abortion, but also guns to a lesser extent. The problem won't go away unless we modify our election system to permit more than two viable parties at a time, so that, say, an anti-abortion party can go way off the rails and its saner voters can defect to another anti-abortion party, without losing anti-abortion voting power in legislative bodies (as, say, a protest vote would), and so on for every other issue. Proportional representation or something along those lines would help a lot. Most any effective change like this would also eliminate or greatly reduce the power of gerrymandering.

[1] Nearly non-existent—he did lose, after all, but narrowly.

Pre-monetized YT was even noticeably better. The my-first-VFX videos aren't even the problem, it's the mountain of outright clickbait burying everything else, and rampant padding of what ought to be 20-30s videos to several minutes for what I assume are monetization reasons, usually starting with a minute of updates about the person's other videos and how much they loved the comments on their last video and blah blah blah, then some recap of stuff you definitely already know if you've sought out this video, and so on.

My wife sometimes watches a video then leaves the "next video" running in the background while she does other stuff. Often it's people talking about movies in clickbait-titled videos. Their primary skill seems to be talking for several minutes without actually saying anything, and avoiding the video title's topic for as long as possible. It's kind of impressive, but does nothing to enrich anyone's life and drowns out better content with worse SEO.

Considering we're in an unprecedented content boom, this would harm me not at all and might even help. The free content might go back to being good stuff from enthusiasts rather than SEO-gaming junk. Signal-to-noise might improve. Interoperable standards for services like messaging might start to matter again.

Peer-to-peer solutions, including IPFS for file storage/serving and various solutions proposed here for decentralized messaging, are no good for battery-powered devices, like cell phones. I don't want mine to burn battery maintaining P2P connections 24/7, or burn battery and my time re-establishing or confirming cached connections every time I wake it up. That puts us back to having a gateway or proxy, so... a server.

A friend of mine works at a state facility where, as he describes it, it's impossible to be a manager without constantly breaking rules, because many contradict one another or violate the laws of reality. Result is that management is a nasty snake-pit where everyone knows which rules everyone else is breaking and they'll collectively point their fingers at anyone who tries to rock the boat (including, and perhaps especially, improving things), quickly getting them fired (or at least transferred somewhere they'd rather not be).

Perhaps significantly, management positions aren't represented by the state workers' union, which is the only thing (barely) insulating the lower level workers from that insanity.

Yeah, but the sidewalk’s like 1/10 the work of the driveway, if that. Heavier the snow the bigger the difference, too, since you have to move the snow so far from the middle to reach the side of the driveway.

Or butt garages up to the street so there's no driveway to speak of. Oh no, now I also don't have a front lawn to mow. How will I ever get over such a loss.

I'm strongly on the side of less tech in (most) classrooms, especially for younger kids, but iPads are pretty awesome if what you're creating involves video, recording audio anywhere other than at a desk, remote-controlling anything, drawing with a pencil/pen-like interface, or any number of other tasks that your average desktop or laptop can't support well without extra hardware, if at all.

If I spend all day watching Netflix I feel like I’ve done nothing but vegetate, but if I play video games I’ve made progress. If I’m constantly scrolling through Facebook I’m keeping up with my friends. If I zigzag half a dozen news sites (I would never pay for or read enough to justify half a dozen newspaper subscriptions) I am being informed about the world.

Even Netflix gives you progress—progress through a season, or through a series. It's guaranteed to come up in conversation when a new season comes out—oh, how far are you, how far did you get last night, when do you expect to finish it. It's not entirely new, but with once-a-week airings you couldn't binge anything, and even with home video releases of series there was a lot more friction, so you couldn't just start watching any ol' thing. You had to really want it.

I remember one of my professors who'd been behind the iron curtain back when there was an iron curtain saying the one thing the commies definitely got right was banning most advertising. Said when they crossed back to West Germany it was like every surface in every city was yelling at him.

Congrats if you find a spouse who's onboard with eating, and feeding your kids, rice and beans for a significant percentage of your dinners and lunches, unless you're so poor the alternative is starving.

Staying healthy solo is easy. Staying healthy as a family is hard.

I got ~160 WPM without learning touch typing.

...what? What kind of error-rate? How long could you sustain that? How'd you manage that speed having to glance between source and keyboard?

I'm pretty sure I was the fastest in my high school typing class (because I already knew how to type very well by then) and at my best I could stay a little over 100wpm for a minute or two without any errors, but it was hard. I could maybe get up around 120-130 transcribing speech and letting minor errors slip though. I doubt I get much over 90wpm at my best these days but it's still fast enough to draw the occasional "whoa!" from people watching me. 160 seems... crazy if you're not touch typing, and way above normal even if you are.

[EDIT] sorry about the tone, I'm not saying you're lying, that's just... wow. Crazy fast. Must have really surprised some people, haha.

I almost exclusively use left modifiers. I blame first person shooters.

There are rules to making oneself well- and easily-understood generally, and to appearing to be an educated writer to other educated people. If you care about neither of those things then sure, there are no rules.

I learned the basics on Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, which must have assumed a monospaced font because it taught the double-space-after-period style. Took years before I learned that wasn't always how you're supposed to type, and another couple years after that to fully break myself of it.

The em-dash shortcut, system-wide remapping of CAPS LOCK to CTRL from the GUI in about 15 seconds flat, a top-level modifier key (command) that's respected enough by developers that it mostly retains its "I belong to the OS and, therefore, to the user, not to you, mere program" character, and a de facto standard package manager that leaves the base system the hell alone, almost never breaks, and can install many of the binary packages I want.

Also if I went back to Linux I'd have to figure out how to remap my window controls to Spectacle's defaults, which'd probably take forever or end up being impossible in the window manager I settled on or whatever.

It's the little things.

Probably just an effect of longer shot lengths (some modern action films are under two seconds average shot length) and not being able to color-correct the hell out of every individual scene separately. Both made possible (or practical, anyway) by digital editing. Without them films tend to be more naturalistic. And like your average stage play they leave you space to think about what you're watching.

You want actually stage-like films you have to go back farther. Wide shots galore, with stage-style blocking. Check out the opening scene of the original Ocean's 11.

Hey, at least this era gave us the improbably-awesome Mad Max: Fury Road.

In any sane universe that would've made every other action filmmaker go "oh, that's how you write and film engaging modern-feeling action that's meaningful to the film itself and its characters and, therefore, to the audience. If it's possible to keep that up for practically an entire film—and, apparently, it is—I can and must do it in my action scenes".

We don't live in a sane universe, unfortunately. But at least we have MM:FR.

Part of the problem is we've seen some of the nastiest predictions of past sci-fi come true... but in the most boring ways. 2001 has an optimistic space-ageyness to it that'd be hard to replicate now without it coming off as forced and false.

Our moon base would be covered in advertisements and each feature named after a corporate sponsor. Everyone on the Pan-Am flight (whatever we rename it to) would be some future-Youtube "personality" live casting their flight and future-gramming their in-flight meals. HAL would become vulnerable when some of his network-controlled doors and such lost their wifi connection and fell back on manual controls, turning the whole thing either comic or, if the manual controls also fail to activate and allow him to win after all, saving him even from his fate in the original film, tragicomic. All of this would come off as insufficiently pessimistic and no-worse-than-things-now to pass for an acceptable projection of our future.

Just doing a straight remake of 2001 with more iPhones won't help it, and my guess is it'll make it feel really, really weird, and not in the ways it was trying to be. Possibly laugh-out-loud funny at times. Its story isn't narrow enough, allegorical enough, or far future enough to ring true now without adding some of our cynicism. The retro-future tech of the original saves it from that scrutiny.

That one's all feel. It's gritty and realistic, but unsettling and dreamlike at the same time. Take out the pointless cinematography and that goes away :-)

If you think that's bad, I've even heard people say that the original Star Wars movie is too slow and boring for them to sit through.

This is how we get the JJ "uh oh, two characters talked for more than 30 seconds, better cap this bit with an action scene even if it does precisely nothing to provide characterization, exposition, or advance plot" Abrams school of film-ruining.