bmj

(Long time climber here)

It is very interesting that since the AI climber is trained on actual climbers, it could, in principle, provide beta to climb consistent with your own style. If you train the bot exclusively on footage of yourself, it would return movement based on your style. If your style is finessy-all-backstep-all-the-time (aka The Edlinger), it can provide beta consistent with that. If your style is to square up and pull (otherwise known as The American), it can provide beta consistent with that instead.

I would think this is actually a Bad Thing. It's very easy to get stuck trying to make a sequence fit your style of climbing. The better approach (especially for long term skill acquisition) is a willingness to learn new styles. That's to say that every sequence is only solvable via one particular style, but I think long term development is hindered if you approach every crux with the one thing you are good at.

So, in terms of solving complicated beta faster, I see real utility to this.

I can agree with this. But, to the point that others have made, I do wonder what this and the availability of beta videos for many, many routes and blocs does to climbing skill overall. Perhaps I'm just a grumpy old man, but, particularly when bouldering, sorting out the beta should be part of the journey toward eventually sending. Last fall, I visited Hueco Tanks after a six year absence. I suppose I was a bit disappointed to see so many people watching YouTube beta videos of nearly every problem they tried.

I went through those stages too: when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes

Oh, boy, I can relate. Every three months, I think our program increment planning meetings can't get more ridiculous and, yet, they do. Most recently, we were told that we should just treat story points as days of effort.

I dove pretty deeply into wood case pencils for a few years (then I got tired of carrying around a good sharpener). Musgrave [https://musgravepencil.com/collections/the-heritage-collecti...] makes some good pencils, though some folks don't like the pronounced hex shape. Mitsu-bishi and Tombow produce some very nice, affordable pencils, though they can be hard to find at times. Everyone knows about Blackwings, but they were never my cup of tea -- the pencil is longer than the average wood case, and the eraser, for as nifty as it is, isn't that great.

Though I use pencils less these days, my current favorites are the Tombow 2558 in 2B and the Musgrave Greenbelt.

There are dozens of birds named in a similar way -- Cooper's Hawk, Brewer's Sparrow, Wilson's Warbler, etc, etc.

I guess I should have qualified that with "financially."

I also value my time, so I am not inclined to push for such a law in my state.

You are correct, but it was sublet to a new tenant. And my employer is not on the hook for paying for their food and coffee, and internet access.

Fully remote work has always benefited the employer more than the employee, at least financially. Before the pandemic closed my employer's local office space (we were all told just to work from home), part of the employer's budget for each employee included infrastructure costs (office space, furniture, internet access, maybe food, beverages, etc). My salary did not change when I became fully remote, so the company realized significant savings by telling one hundred to just work from home.

Now, if a company has always been fully remote, then, yes, this sort of thing is ultimately going to hurt the employee because the company needs to recuperate those unplanned costs.

Personally, as a fully remote employee, I don't how to feel about this. Sure, I'd love my employer to offset some of my utility costs, but I also don't want them to assume that means they can control their use (which is their right in the context of an office space).

Weirdly, only left wing people read him. But he's actually quite libertarian compatible.

There are quite a few on the Right that read Illich as well. He was, essentially, a communitarian anarchist. Some of his thought is well-received on the Right, particularly his critique of institutionalized education and medicine.

I've read a handful, and agree that he truly understood the effects of technology and Modernity. It's worth reading the French sociologist/theologian Jacques Ellul, too (they were contemporaries).

There is too much paperwork involved with performance related firings and layoffs happen so fast and so wide it's usually done by lottery.

Can confirm this. My employer dropped about 10% of staff in order to back fill those positions with contractors from low-cost centers (India, Hungary, Costa Rica). Managers were not consulted in the decisions, and simply told they were losing employees $x, $y, and $z.

Don't forget that VB.NET was a thing. I worked on a web-based client management system that used VB.NET on the back-end.

I can confirm this: I know several mechanical engineers that do mission critical-type systems (think "power plants"), and they routinely use Excel VBA for calculations.

potentially just a youth culture thing. I don't know what young people are up to these days, but _more_ phone use in inappropriate situations certainly doesn't sound surprising

In my experience, inappropriate device use is definitely NOT just a "youth" thing.

My workflow is similar. For one larger project, I am just more comfortable operating in VSCode, but if I need to work in a smaller project, I tend to just fire up NeoVim, and I've found the transition to Lazygit to be fairly smooth.

Strength training !== bulking up

High (comparative) weight + low reps builds strength (and muscle recruitment) without (necessarily) building lots of new muscle fibers. Muscle hypertrophy happens most often with lower weights and higher repetitions, plus loads of calories. A program like "Starting Strength" is not about hypertrophy.

Any exercise is potentially "unhealthy," particularly if it requires specialized movements. You can learn proper form for "base" lifts like the squat and deadlift without any equipment at first.

My auto insurance provider (in the US) has never even offered such a tracking program to me (and I know my current rates are pretty reasonable/in line with other companies). Maybe it's because of my history with the provider (I'm 50 and they've been covering me since I was 16)?

The movie does away with the ambiguity at the end of the book, in an effort to have a vaguely "happy ending."

The best adaption of McCarthy's work to the screen is No Country For Old Men. The Coen brothers seem to "get" McCarthy better than others.

My understanding that the yearly membership packages aren't the sum total of what they do. I suspect those packages are ways to support the business, rather than provide a free/cheap service. According to the article, customers pay for parts at cost, and then there is a scale, based on income, for paying labor charges.

Also, note that "Toyota Dealer Maintenance Packages" are generally offered to people who have purchased their vehicle at the dealer, new (or slightly used). That's not the target market here, and compared to having those services performed at an independent shop (or at a dealer without such a package), that monthly charge is quite affordable.

globally install a modern version of Python in a Docker container

You lost a bunch of people right there. There's a significant difference between "open a terminal" and "install Docker, create a container, configure the latest version of Python."

Recumbents are notoriously difficult to ride as the grades get steeper. Upright cyclists have the advantage using different body positions (i.e. standing), but 'bent cyclists can't do that. On the steepest grades, it can be a challenge to even keep a 'bent's front wheel on the ground.

My direct experience is that they send high quality technical architects to get the deal done and the moment that happens those architects vanish and they back up the school bus and send in an army of zero competence low experience drones who are barely functional.

This is also my experience. Accenture was given several high value projects, and their technical architects made it seem like they had the knowledge and skills to deliver. When I spoke to one of the in-house engineers a few months later, he said the consultants had yet to deliver anything of value, and the on-going planning made it seem like the team from Accenture actually doing the work didn't even fully understand the project.

On my own project, the Accenture team took nearly an entire program increment to deliver a clearly dysfunctional plan for implementing a progressive web app based on one of our products. They submitted an MR for the plan, and after the number of review comments reached 50, they just moved on to other things.

I am sure there are some good consultants at Accenture. I just haven't worked with them.

Yep. The executives at my employer realized the consultants were "underperforming" and cut their contracts, but this just left the in-house teams stuck with fixing or rewriting the Accenture code, piled on top of their current project work.

I can confirm this. My employer brought in several teams from Accenture to push through some new tech initiatives, and every one of them is basically a dumpster fire. I was doing code reviews for one of the teams, and nearly every commit would be sent back with multiple findings. Some of these commits were literally minor UI updates that someone with a few hours of Udemy HTML/CSS training could do without issues.

I live in a Rust Belt city, and most of the homeschoolers within the city are secular, and stridently so (and here there's greater overlap between homeschoolers and unschoolers). There are plenty of Christian homeschoolers as well, and their reasons for that choice are quite varied. So, you are painting with a very broad brush and making assumptions based on cultural stereotypes.

Personally, my wife and I homeschooled our kids through junior high school, in a mix of Christian cooperatives and homespun curriculum. One kid went to high school at the local Roman Catholic school, the other to a public school.

This is absolutely correct. There really is no single definition of unschooling and even homeschooling. I know families that say they "homeschool" their kids, yet those kids attend an "academy" three days a week that provides the curriculum, teaching, and homework. The parents really just make sure the kids do their work. This is very distinct from what my wife and I did -- pulling together a curriculum ourselves, and doing 75% of the teaching.

Sure, fixing the problem is great, but if the CEO needs to personally witness the issue for it to get fixed, then there must be thousands of other issues not being fixed.

Keep in mind in a corporation like Starbucks, the CEO is likely a hundred or more levels removed from the daily operations of a cafe. That's a lot of internal politics for even a motivated regional manager to navigate.

Ironically, the last time my family purchased a "newer" car (2015), we avoided the Ford Flex and instead purchased a Honda Pilot because the Pilot didn't have a touchscreen for anything. We currently have a 2022 Nissan Altima as a rental (one of the kids totaled the beater 2004 Subaru Forester), and while climate controls still use buttons and knobs, everything else is controlled via a tablet-like touchscreen. I hate it.

I tend to use legal pads to write initial drafts. I carry a few A5 kraft notebooks in a Lochby Field Journal. Each notebook has a dedicated purpose, and carrying them in the Lochby means I don't destroy the notebooks while they are in my bag. I don't care much about the brand of notebook, since I write almost exclusively with pencils -- I'll grab whatever is available at the office supply store.

I'm currently in the nascent stages of transitioning from software engineering to practicing as a (Christian) spiritual director. I went through a two year training program a few years ago, and spent roughly 5-20 hours a month working with people (5 hours represents the number of individuals I see a month, 20 hours when I facilitating some group retreats through my parish). I'd love to move out of engineering completely in the next few years, but I'm still figuring out how to grow my practice enough to provide enough income. Much of my parish-related work is still done on a volunteer basis. I suspect I will need to find other part-time work to supplement income as a director.

There's also the not-so-small matter of providing good health insurance for my not-yet-adult kids. That change is probably another three to five years down the road.

Agreed. And you don't have "mystery" issues with mechanical discs, like when the piston gets gunked up and doesn't return properly when releasing the lever.