avinium

I co-organize a handful of Meetup groups, and we already pay a non-negligible annual fee. There's definitely money to be made.

Most people seem happy shelling out $100-200 per year for a membership. $2 per attendee per event is simply exorbitant, noone will be able to afford that.

It's so bizarrely extreme, I can only assume it's a psychological "anchoring" tactic - a patently ludicrous number that makes the "real" offer (2-3x fee hike) more "reasonable".

That was my initial reaction, too. Or is long distance running much less of a "young person sport" than others?

Are you me? 95% of my diet is broccoli, zucchini, spinah, chicken, beef, walnuts and peanuts.

I'll usually indulge in a carb/sugar binge once a week. Any more than that, I feel rubbish physically - bloated, sluggish, hungry, irritable.

I'm amazed at how fresh they've stayed - testament to Matt and Trey I guess. Most comedies are beating dead horses within 5 seasons.

Certificated is definitely a valid word, though perhaps not in "layperson English". In (Commonwealth) legalese, share holdings are referred to as either uncertificated or certificated.

Even the median income comparison is probably too favourable - Wuhan and LA are apples to oranges. I'm sure LA is one of the higher-income cities in the US, and Wuhan is one of the lower.

Sorry but remark only reveals lack of knowledge of what Forms, WPF and UWP are capable of, their related tooling and component libraries from the likes of Telerik, DevExpress, ComponentOne, among others.

I'm fully aware of WinForms, WPF, UWP, having built applications with all of them at one stage or another.

As far as UI frameworks go, they're serviceable - but no way am I recommending .NET just because of them (well, maybe WinForms if someone's writing that type of application).

Personal opinion, of course.

It's about the value you deliver for the company.

Well, yes, but $1 in Malaysia goes a lot further than $1 in SV. So "equal pay" isn't really equal at all.

COL-adjusted salaries are perfectly reasonable in my opinion.

In all fairness, I haven't touched Visual Studio (for either F# or C# dev) in at least 18 months, so you're probably right.

That being said, UI isn't a strength on .NET to begin with, so I think it's unfair to point that criticism at F#. Uno seems to doing some great things though.

The F# SQL type provider, however, is great. For those who don't know, this generates design- and compile-time types based on your (live) DB schema, enabling auto-complete and compile-time type checking for SQL queries. I do agree that Ionide/VS Code support isn't quite there yet.

To be perfectly honest, I don't know what you're referring to by "application architecture design".

It's definitely not perfect - I never claimed otherwise. I'm just saying that everything points to MS increasing support for F#, not the opposite.

That's fascinating, and exactly the type of working environment I'm looking to create.

Outside the US, I think we (rightly or wrongly) view American working culture as blunt and direct. From what you've said here, Intel seems like a very good case study to learn from.

Yes, this is a recent-ish change. FSI is available under .NET Core 3 Preview, and someone recently mentioned that it's working under 2.2 too.

I think that's not entirely fair. While MS could definitely invest more resources in F#, I wouldn't say it's been neglected (or dying). Just to mention a few developments in recent years: 1) IDE support via Ionide in VS Code 2) Easy install with NuGet 3) cross-platform FSI supported via NET Core 4) some pretty cool updates recently around anonymous records, optional yields, nameof (just to mention a few) 5) no breaking changes (I'm aware of, anyway)

I'd say the future looks pretty bright for F#. It's really resonating with an audience that wants "functional where I want, but practical where I need".

This approach is really appealing to me, it sounds like a good way to cut through all the dancing around egos.

In retrospect, though, is this effective?

What makes you say that?

I find the stroke anecdote fairly unconvincing. The man clearly still had the capacity for language - he was miming the action of a tennis racquet. Sign language is still language. Just because something went haywire between his brain and his mouth doesn't mean he lacked language.

I also don't think you can easily dismiss the conscious of animals by saying they lack language. Most animals (dogs, whales, birds, etc) seem to engage in limited communication via audible signals.

As with most philosophical questions, though, it all hangs on the definition of "consciousness". It may not even be a concept worth defining.

Curious to know if you're a drug user?

That's not really the point. Your diet works for you - great! Noone's saying it's biologically impossible.

But most people won't find it easy to regulate their caloric intake eating ramen and chocolate. They will find it much easier with vegetables, lean protein and high fat.

It's pretty common to cut 5-10kg in preparation for wrestling/judo competitions.

A natural 6kg fluctuation isn't inconceivable. I'm fairly sure I could get there starting dehydrated/carb-depleted and pounding a carb-heavy meal with a lot of fluids.

It definitely wouldn't be accidental, though.

It's not so easy to binge protein bars, despite companies doing their chemical best to make them taste like candy.

Amusing anecdote - for some reason, after a night on the town in Hong Kong, I ended up back in my hotel room, ravenous, with nothing to eat but a box of 10 protein bars that had been gifted to me.

I tore through the whole box in under 10 minutes. My stomach did not thank me.

It does matter what you eat. Not in the sense of "calories in, calories out" - which, as you mentioned, is simple biology.

But it is important in the sense of "which diet is easiest to follow?".

That will vary person to person. But for many people, the answer is low-carb/intermittent-fasting. It eliminates the blood sugar/hormonal response, requires less effort than regular eating, and still lets you eat palatable food.

I consider myself a seasoned dieter (meaning I can manipulate my weight +/-10kg fairly easily). Over at least a dozen weight cuts/bulks, the most effective practice I've found is writing a meal plan, and writing down everything you put in your mouth.

Many people have started losing weight just by doing this - without actively changing their diet. It has a really profound subconscious impact on what/how much you put in your mouth.

The psychological/hormonal aspect of food is fascinating.

While you're right, I also wonder why anyone cares if a bunch of cash-rich, overconfident private equity funds get fleeced? They're more than capable of taking care of themselves.

"Counterfeit capitalism" in the era of cheap money is probably a net benefit to the average Joe because it subsidies his co-working space/taxi trips/meal deliveries/etc.

I'm not saying that intelligence and bias are orthogonal. That discussion requires a much deeper consideration of human cognition and psychology :)

I'm just saying that model bias is a very easy thing to explain (usually, data imbalance).

You can also fiddle with the label ratios to change the bias - which is also a good way of showing that the models aren't really intelligent.

Fairly limited, but anonymous pipes might fit your use case:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/io/how-to-u...

I strongly prefer they keep the bias. It shows plainly that these models have zero intelligence, they're just pattern matching over specific datasets.

I don't want the appearance of fairness (introduced by human dataset curation) to be mistaken for "intelligence".

Keeping the bias would hopefully cause people to think more critically about why such bias exists in the model in the first place.

For the uninitiated, what happened with Guido van Rossum?

I have a pet theory that our brains are hard-wired to store information "better" if it bears some kind of personal/individual imprint.

In other words, we can "store" knowledge more efficiently when written in our own handwriting than when typed into a neutral/generic text editor.

Logically, you could be completely correct. Had I taken the other path, I may well be sitting here today saying "I massively regret not giving myself enough space to achieve".

And you're right, finding satisfaction on your chosen path is really the only way to deal with these types of emotions.

But all that being said, I'll fight tooth and nail to stop my kids from making the same mistake I did.

I remember in my 20s I had this constant anxiety about running out of time. That if I didn't accomplish whatever I wanted to accomplish soon I'd never be able to do it. The emotion gradually disappeared during my 30s.

I had the same feeling in my 20s.

I'm now in my 30s, and the biggest regret I have in life is that I lost a relationship because I needed to "accomplish something before I ran out of time". Even though I had no absolutely idea what that "something" actually was.

It's a horrible, depressing realization.

To anyone reading this - please, please don't jeopardise a relationship because you feel unsettled or anxious about the future. You can backtrack from most mistakes in life, but a broken relationship is not one of them.

I worked in commercial property for some time, which allowed me to understand why certain things happen that seem irrational from the outside.

Everything in real estate is driven by the valuation. This dictates lending terms, tenant acquisition, sales & marketing strategy, everything.

But valuations, fundamentally, are just numbers that an independent advisor plucks out of thin air. It's a difficult job that ends up being a mishmash of guesswork of what things could be rented for, and how much they will appreciate over the coming years, and tangible numbers around what other "comparable" properties are selling/renting for right now.

This isn't as nonsensical as it sounds. After all, an untenanted building clearly isn't "worthless".

Now owners have every incentive to push this valuation up. Actual yield (i.e. how much rent you are actually receiving at any given point in time) limits your flexibility to do so. It's difficult to convince the valuer that your space could be rented for $1000 psqm when it's already being rented out at $800 psqm.

Absurdly, it's much easier to convince a valuer that untenanted space could be rented at $1000 psqm. There's no direct evidence to the contrary, so the smoke and mirrors story is much more convincing.

This is why commercial landlords will almost always lose a tenant before dropping rents. The latter will crystallise a reduction in yield which immediately affects the property's valuation (and thus their sale prospects or leverage ratio).

It was incredibly eye-opening to see how much unreality goes on in real estate.