HN user
Email: marc (at) auxbuss.com Web: http://auxbuss.com/
LaunchBar doesn't use Spotlight's data. And so, as a result, can't search for data inside files. That said, it provides a Search in Spotlight command – that you can assign a shortcut, if you wish – which returns its results in a new Finder window.
I also host my own email. In my case, Google always routes the first email I send to a new Gmail address as spam. After the recipient marks the email as good, future emails are received as expected. The only way around this is to advise the recipient via Gmail that I've set an email to them via a different route, so that they can check their spam and mark the email as good. This has been going on for at least two years.
Basically, Google are shadow-banning me till they get caught. I think this should be illegal.
Gmail always rejects the first email I send to a new gmail account. It does this every time – and has done for years – despite the fact I have sent emails to hundreds of other gmail accounts, and send emails to such accounts every day.
This is the reason I personally will not touch any Google services. And in business, I excise Google services as a priority. If a company cannot handle email in a civil manner, it certainly can't be trusted with anything of importance.
Space en-dash space is standard British typography – whereas US uses em-dash and jams the words together on either side of it.
It took centuries for the written word to acquire spaces between words, and then the US decided to jam them back together again.
Curious why folk are using two hyphens "--" instead of en-dash.
I agree. And this together with the obvious misunderstanding of Exhalation re: thermodynamics led me to put down the article.
I don't think the article was written by an LLM, but I'm convinced it was LLM-enabled. Which is a pity, because the author seems to have some interesting things to say. But that's the problem with leaning on an LLM: you lose your own voice, and good writing is centred around voice.
Verily.
Robert Saunders, Reader in Modern British History at Queen Mary’s London, wrote an interesting thread about “the economy”.
https://bsky.app/profile/robertsaunders.bsky.social/post/3la...
He starts out by noting that the economy as an idea is very recent invention. And yet it tops the list of voters concerns.
"If you had told Mr Gladstone that "the economy has grown this year", he would not have understood what those words meant."
(William Gladstone was the British Prime Minister, on and off, between 1868 and 1894. He is considered to be one of the great British PMs.)
"Gladstone was the most financially literate statesman of the 19th Century. But the idea of something called "the economy", which could "grow" or "shrink", did not exist."
"It (THE economy) first appeared in a major manifesto in 1950 and didn't get its own section until 1955. That's also when terms like "economic growth" appeared in Parliament."
“What we now call "economics" was usually termed "political economy”. "Economy" was not a technocratic exercise, but a moral and political arena."
"… it subordinated a moral and political judgment (what is "good economy?") to a blunter question: how do we make "the" economy bigger? In reality, economic choices were still moral and political. But they were cast as technocratic questions about "competence" and know-how."
"(and) … it turned "the economy" into a "thing", to be weighed against other, different "things": such as "the environment" or "saving lives". And it encouraged a tendency to make "growth" the goal, without asking what was growing, why and to whose benefit."
I recommend reading the whole thread if you are interested to learn how we got here.
And looking forward?
"Recognising that our concepts are historically specific - that they have been different in the past and might be different in the future - helps us to imagine other ways of talking and thinking in the present. In an age of so many economic challenges, we surely need more of that."
Years ago, I went to live and work in Strasbourg. My French was… rudimentary, school-level, but after a few weeks I was picking up the rhythm and following along. Then the grand chef came up from Paris. During the night out entertaining him, I asked him to slow down a bit as I was struggling with his accent. He completely lost it, insulting the locals as peasants, and claiming the accent was theirs not his. Kind of put a damper on the evening.
Obviously the Marseille “dialect” is recognisable, but otherwise, travelling throughout France, and even the French-speaking parts of Switzerland, I could understand folk.
Thanks. This is excellent, as you'd expect from Emily Maitlis.
Proper old school investigative journalism, and he didn't hold back. Terrific scam, but, y'know, PayPal – I'm an old timer and remember the early days of that outfit. They're still blocked at the firewall from events 25 years ago.
Remember kids: Marketing is a psychopathy.
Not sure why the reply buro9 gave is dead
I vouched for it, so it should be visible now.
If you're interested in how vector calculus developed, and who was instrumental, all the way from Newton/Leibnitz to Dirac or so, by way of Hamilton, Maxwell, Einstein and others, then Robyn Arianrhod's 'Vector' is brilliant.
But be warned, it gets progressively harder, along with the concepts, so unless you're conversant with tensors, at some point you will have to put on your thinking cap.
The reviews on Goodreads – including my own – are worth reading to get a flavour: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/202104095-vector
Stacy McGough wrote about this topic recently wrt the third Gaia data release: https://tritonstation.com/2023/09/19/recent-developments-con...
The best – and I think the only – way to discover what good code looks like is to work with it.
Eventually, after working on, say, half a dozen code bases, you'll start to understand intuitively what good code is, providing you get lucky enough to find a good code base, or a code base with a significant amount of good code.
It's a long old journey, but once you have the skill, it never goes away. It's like learning a musical instrument or a foreign language. (By which I mean you can read as many books as you like about it, but without application, you haven't yet begun. Nevertheless, read the books.)
Warning: most developers never attain this skill, but almost all of them believe – truly believe – that they write good code; just as everyone thinks they are a good – nay excellent – driver.
Warning: no one writes good code. Good code becomes good through iteration, just as good writing becomes good by iteration/editing. The reason for this is obvious; but if you don't know why, then you haven't done enough yet.
Warning: everyone has biases. Learn to recognise yours and when you are applying them. Learn to ignore them and see things through a different lens. Explore with an open mind.
Iterating to good code is one of the most satisfying things you can do with software development.
There's a real world example of this situation from the six-month Irish bank strike of 1970. Cheques, pubs, and trust ultimately replaced the banking system; and everything kept moving; not perfectly, of course, but neither are our current systems.
A couple of links to get you going, but there's a lot of data out there on this:
https://archive.is/20180106184835/https://www.ft.com/content...
https://archive.ph/20120802230107/http://www.independent.ie/...
It's also an object lesson on how money is created out of thin air.
293,000¹ vs 184,000², so about 1.6 times the word count.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire#Publish...
² https://www.anycount.com/word-count-of-books/harry-potter-wo...
Let me present a counterpoint.
I have two Apple machines. One is old and stuck on Catalina – three iterations behind the current macOS [Catalina -> Big Sur -> Monterey -> Ventura] – so for a long while I kept both on Catalina to avoid issues. Sadly, the older machine died a few weeks ago, so I decided to update the other machine to Monterey (because Ventura is still in the teething-troubles phase).
Now I get about 9 Mbps here, so I started the upgrade before bed, and left it overnight to do its thing. Next day I was presented with the garish boot Monterey boot-screen and logged in.
That’s it. This is a boring story.
There were a few small cosmetic differences, but otherwise everything was just as it was before. No clicks required. No dark patterns. Dare I say: it just worked.
There’s no reason Microsoft, or any other company, can’t do this. It’s simply respecting the user/customer.
I left the Microsoft universe about a decade ago simply because it felt too stressful. Nothing was concrete. It felt like the sand was always shifting beneath you. I have no love of Apple – I’ll move if they start playing games – but for now, they do most things – far from everything – well, and I never feel disrespected, even if my wallet is somewhat lighter every now and then.
This is exactly how it was on twitter during the early years.
Yes, this is the biggest problem. Otherwise it's a great project. But until this is fixed, not worth playing, sadly.
Philip Pullman uses it too to great effect.
Climate breakdown is commonly used in the UK.
Guy Debord wrote about this thoroughly in The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/381440.The_Society_of_th...
And Johnny Rotten: “Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Cheated?”
J.G, Ballard talked about it a lot. See his interviews in Extreme Metaphors, rather than his novels.
“I feel that the 1960s represent a marked turning point. For the first time, with the end of the Cold War, I suppose, for the first time the outside world, so-called reality, is now almost completely a fiction. It’s a media landscape, if you like. It’s almost completely dominated by advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising. People’s lives, even their individual private lives, are getting more and more controlled by what I call fiction. By fiction I mean anything invented for imaginative purposes. For example, you don’t buy an airline ticket, you don’t just buy transportation, let’s say, to the south of France or Spain. What you buy is the image of a particular airline, the kind of miniskirts the hostesses are wearing on that airline. In fact, airlines in America are selling themselves on this sort of thing.
"Also the sort of homes people buy for themselves, the way they furnish their houses, even the way they talk, the friends they have, everything is becoming fictionalised. Therefore, given that reality is now a fiction, it’s not necessary for the writer to invent the fiction. The writer’s relationship with reality is completely the other way around. It’s the writer’s job to find the reality, to invent the reality, not to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. The greatest fictional characters of the twentieth century are people like the Kennedys. They’re a twentieth-century House of Atreus.”
From a 1968 interview with Jannick Storm
Sebastian Barry is a master. Try Days Without End.
Quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/50666270-days-without-...
The criminally unknown Janni Howker borders on poetry in her prose. Try Martin Farrell.
re: The Golden Compass (sic)
Not only did the American editors change the title, but the device in question – the alethiometer, which is not a compass – is made of brass not gold in the original text. The US editors basically changed it to gold to fit their created title.
They're called heteronyms, and there are a lot of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)
panorama is similar.
Marc Morris [0] has a new book out in May entitled: The Anglo-Saxons: The Making of England: 410-1066 [1]
I'm not a history nerd, but his Norman Conquest book [2] almost turned me. It's more fun than most novels.
For a non-academic approach, written by a academic, I wouldn't look anywhere else. And while you're waiting, read Norman Conquest. It's brilliant.
[0] https://twitter.com/longshanks1307 [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52025940-the-anglo-saxon... [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13065400-the-norman-conq...
In Quiver, you can right-click a notebook (or All Notes) and export to markdown – as well as png, plain text, pdf, or png.
This paper [0] from a couple of days ago (24 Feb 2020) found that Betelgeuse's recent dimming was not caused by a drop in the star's surface temperature.
"We present optical spectrophotometry of the red supergiant Betelgeuse from 2020 February 15, during its recent unprecedented dimming episode. By comparing this spectrum to stellar atmosphere models for cool supergiants, as well as spectrophotometry of other Milky Way red supergiants, we conclude that Betelgeuse has a current effective temperature of 3600 +/- 25 K. While this is slightly cooler than previous measurements taken prior to Betelgeuse's recent lightcurve evolution, this drop in effective temperature is insufficient to explain Betelgeuse's recent optical dimming. We propose that episodic mass loss and an increase in the amount of large-grain circumstellar dust along our sightline to Betelgeuse is the most likely explanation for its recent photometric evolution."
One of the authors, Emily Levesque, also posted a related twitter thread. [1]
Neoliberalism is broadly defined as the extension of competitive markets into all areas of life, including the economy, politics and society.
See Mont Pelerin Society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society
... and Friedrich Hayek, Frank Knight, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler, and Milton Friedman.
Implemented by Reagan and Thatcher.
Biases:
• The Market is efficient => give it free-reign
• The State is incompetent => remove it
• Trade is win-win => open borders
• Society => There is no such thing (see Thatcher)
• Finance is infallible => 2008?