atotic

I expected this essay to end with a note about software's golden age.

Thanks for sharing. I'v'e read the book, and for me it made everything click. I've had serious childhood trauma (violence, alcoholism, etc) and have been "clumsy" all my life. Basically, I was all brain, and I completely neglected my body till I was 40. After reading the book, I posited that clumsy is trauma-related, and since I've resolved the trauma, there is no reason why I can't fix the clumsy. It's a process, and clumsy is almost gone.

I think people who deny this have not experienced serious childhood trauma. I agree that body might not keep the score for everything, but sometimes it really does.

The other thing that happened after reading the book is that I've become aware of how common trauma is. 4 out of 5 my college buddies experienced variety of early traumas: SA, alcoholism. Often I can sense trauma while speaking with someone. There is awkwardness, intensity in their gaze, emotions slightly off. I used to be attracted to it.

NYT mentioned NWS staffing shortage, but did not say this was connected to body count: "The office is also one of several left without an overnight forecaster, but on Friday, it stayed open and was sufficiently staffed for the night, issuing 11 tornado warnings. It was “all hands on deck,” Mr. Fahy said."

Agreed, Adam really is one of the best at what he does. His talks, demos, were always so interesting. My guess is that he'll be at Microsoft shortly.

What Google is saying with this layoff is that they no longer care about web developer relations. Chrome has not been well funded for years.

Firefox did the same thing five years ago, when they fired David Baron, who was one of the top 5 engineers in the world that understood how HTML layout works. He got instantly hired by Chrome.

It is kind of crazy that the core group that moves web standards forward is around 150 people. And most of them did not get rich off it, and have been doing it for decades.

Has anyone built a search engine that indexes only "no annoyances" web sites?

My kid had sleep apnea. His problem was narrow nasal passages. He got EASE surgery from Dr. Kasey Lee when he was 14, and was completely cured. You get better results getting surgery while bones are still pliable. It was like a miracle, an outpatient procedure that changes your life.

After the surgery, he was finally able to get quality sleep, and his personality changed. Before the surgery he was super-intense, slightly ADHD, not doing great in school. All this went away after the surgery, he is just a regular bright kid now. We noticed changes in the first week, took about 2 years to find new normal. Before the surgery, we tried CPAP for a while, and it helped a bit.

My wife also had the same surgery. It helped, but did not completely cure her apnea.

I am not sure if built-in indexing supports only indexing subset of the tree. YOu want to selectively index for speed and accuracy. The complete tree might contain multiple definitions of the same functions, as headers get copied, pre-processed, etc.

I was a C++ Chrome developer till 2020, and I primarily used Sublime Text because of speed, and I found VSCode weekly releases too distracting.

I indexed code locally with CTags, and then used SublimeText CTags extension for navigation. This worked great for my local branches. When I needed to dig deep, I'd use source.chromium.org which indexes perfectly.

# ctags command that indexes just Google's chrome code ctags --languages=C++ --exclude=third_party --exclude=.git --exclude=build --exclude=out --exclude=tools --exclude=mojo --exclude=base -R -f .tmp_tags ctags --languages=C++ -a -R -f .tmp_tags third_party/blink mv .tmp_tags .tags

My 11 and 13yo happily ride on the back of my cargo bike (Extracycle). Some of their braver, bike riding friends, do ask "Why don't you ride by yourself?"

I used to have a burley before the cargo. I think the cargo upright position makes it feel a bit more grown up. Plus, it is so fun.

The highschooler absolutely refuses to ride the back of the cargo, and insists on being driven by car. It takes so much longer with all the traffic, but he is willing to suffer to avoid looking uncool.

The solution is obvious: the kid should have been armed. The neighbor would not have approached him, and he would have been able to defend himself from predators.

Seeing PEEK and POKE two pages into the article made me laugh. I always treated those like black magic, mysterious lines that I got out of a magazine that did cool stuff.

I loved the Simons Basic cartridge, that gave me a lot of the PEEK/POKE power wrapped up in new Basic keywords. Sprites were so cool!

those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome.

COVID statistics are hard to interpret clearly. But, looking at the list of deaths/100K, it is clear that states that did take COVID seriously mostly had fewer deaths. Depending on how you slice the numbers I'd call 30% fewer deaths a significantly better outcome.

Deaths/100K California: 234 Texas: 307 Florida: 353 New York: 355

My guess is that mass unemployment, homelessness, and increasing substance abuse were not higher where COVID was taken seriously, but proving that would take too much of my time.

I hope Goggles can be used as a ranking signal to help default search engine deliver better results.

Google has never had the appetite for letting users explicitly improve its results. Their reasoning was that pure algorithm is the only possible solution that scales. Even the minor features, such as "I never want to see this site", were removed.

I am glad Brave is trying out something different. Crossing my fingers that it works, the current state of search is so meh..

Thank you! I've scanned over web development, looks like a well thought out modern curiculum. In 2022, it is tough to pick a good path for a beginner, and I like your choices.

I think that the decision on whether to use a framework is very hard.

When using a framework, you get most of the benefits right away, and most of the costs happen much later, when abandoning the framework is costly.

Besides pure technical quality, you have to consider more murky issues: who wrote the framework? how long will they be around for? Does their problem match your problem? Will your interests remain aligned in the future? Is there a succession plan? Will new hires be familiar with it? What's the learning curve? Does it integrate with the other N tools you are using?

Ideally, the decision to use the framework or not should be made by someone who has used it before. This is often not the case.

My personal preference is to always use simplest tools that get the job done.

I wish that hiring technical writers to write docs was more common. Most of the new libraries I have to use have documentation that is so poor, I have to use stack overflow + write test cases.

Currently, I am in the middle of taking over a go code hairball from someone who left, and who loved external dependencies. Out of 31 direct dependencies, 11 are not at release 1.0 yet. Many have poor documentation. I believe that when I am done with it, our code will have fewer dependencies, and be half the size.

I was wondering where did all these "I started with fresh account, randomly clicked, and found something awful" articles about TikTok came from. Now I know.

It was so puzzling, because my experience has been so different. TikTok is the most positive, large scale, social platform I've ever used. It has exposed me to disabled people's, LGBTQ, POV and all kinds of neat things I'd have never even thought of.

California forever, goodbye!

It is impossible to rule out apnea without a sleep study. My kid had apnea, and I'd lay in bed with him for hours, and I never noticed anything beyond sleeping with his mouth open, or slight stirring. Sleep study revealed that he was consistently waking up 6 times an hour.

His apnea got cured with EASE surgery. It dramatically changed his personality. Sleep apnea is often misdiagnosed as ADHD in kids.

Mine is empty as well. I think this article is misleading. The takout list does not come from gmail, but are "purchases made directly within Google Search, Maps, or Assistant".

I do wish gmail would keep track of all my purchases. Keeping a folder named "shopping" is ok, but it could be so much more.

Next to each purchase I'd love to see: - link to a manual, youtube videos about this product. - remainders when stock is low (for things I might reorder).

I was helping prep my high school kid for his evolution quiz. One of the concepts was "punctured equilibrium". To get his attention, and make it relevant I used: "global warming is puncturing the equilibrium today. What do you think that looks like?"

I was just talking to someone today about what the programming might look like in 20 years. He was hoping for something more graphical.

I told him that HyperCard was the only graphical programming environment that I ever loved. My first real job had me making stacks and XFCNs.

Anecdote: I live in Palo Alto, and my entire neighborhood is on Comcast. In January, service got to be really bad, 1Mbs upload during the day. Comcast came out, said our local node was saturated at 92%, and that they have an upgrade planned a year from now, and that we can suck it till then.

This is Palo Alto, the land of very vocal neighbors. They started a campaign where we all sent a complaint to the FCC. Within a week, we were personally contacted by a Comcast rep, techs came out, and suddenly I had 30Mbs up. And Comcast reps have been calling, emailing every week to make sure we are ok. Not sure what happened, the node did not get upgraded, but they fixed something.

And another data point on how sad the situation is in the US: my brother lives in Belgrade, Serbia, in one of those concrete high-rises from the 70s. He got fiber this year from a private company, and his speeds beat mine, and it is dirt cheap. There is no logical explanation for the fact that his internet speeds beat mine, and I am a mile away from Google HQ.

I've read this study a while ago, and I think it helped me correct my son's myopia.

When my 5yo kid's eye check came back with "he'll need glasses next year", we started strict "hour+ outside play daily" policy. At his next checkup, he had normal vision. Dr was surprised.

I can relate to some of your quirks. I am now 50+, with 3 kids, and I've left most of the quirks behind.

I used to always try to please others. My dysfunctional family liked it that way. It made their life easier. That was one of the last quirks to go. It was only after being forced into being assertive to defend my kids, I've realized that it is ok to stand up for yourself. Life's been much better since, surprisingly, most people appreciate assertiveness. And being assertive is not nearly as exhausting as being nice.

It was a long journey, started with therapy 25 years ago.

I used to be all-in on Amazon shopping, that's where I started all my shopping searches.

Now Amazon is my site of last resort for everything but books. The rest of the net has gotten competitive. I do my research on wirecutter/reddit, and buy it from manufacturer/walmart/bestbuy, other niche trustworthy stores.

The cash back I get back from my Amazon card usually covers cost of most of what I still buy from Amazon, so Amazon has become my "free goodies" shop.

I think this is great. Having "an everything store" that everyone uses always felt like a monopoly ripe for customer abuse.

When I saw that this will be the first RCV Senate election, I was so happy. It is a close race, with great potential for a 3rd party influencing the outcome. This is exactly where RCV is the right way to tally the votes.

Interesting bit is that RCV was implemented as a result of Maine ballot initiative in 2016, but it took years to actually implement it because of the lawsuits.

The politicians fought hard against it: the people's vote was repealed by Maine legislature right away. In 2017 voters had to vote on it again, and overruled the repeal.

Maine is viewed as a testbed: if RCV works there, it could be the model for the nation. It is on the ballot for congressional elections in Massachusetts right now.

I think there is a market for selling rights to browser extensions. Someone I know with a mildly popular extension got offered $10K by a buyer to completely take over.

This market might be one of the reasons why extension API powers have been scaled down.

Maybe. I receive several packages a week, and this is the first time I've seen a weird delay since the pandemic started. That's why I found it unusual.

I suspect something unusual is happening too. I've been watching a tiny package I ordered being shipped from San Mateo to Palo Alto via UPS. It has been 7 days, and for the last 4 days its status in San Leandro has been: "Package departed UPS Mail Innovations facility enroute to USPS for induction" Can't wait for that dark chocolate cocoa floss!

There are online communities dedicated to these questions. Looks like the current tool of choice is OSCR https://gitlab.com/pholy/OSCAR-code

"Evaluating the performance of past climate model projections"

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019...

"We found that climate models – even those published back in the 1970s – did remarkably well, with 14 out of the 17 projections statistically indistinguishable from what actually occurred."