cutchin

I wish they'd have given more examples for traditional bikes than bottom brackets. Yeah, bike shops have to deal with lots of different BBs, but that's because they deal with bikes that might be 30 or 40 years old, from all over the planet. Some threaded, some press-fit, etc. Some high-end, some very cheap.

On the most part, bike manufacturers use standardized parts that can be replaced by and end-user with sufficient know-how and the tools to do it. There aren't that many companies making drivetrain parts, so you tend to see Shimano and SRAM just about everywhere, and maybe the odd Campagnolo-equipped bike every now and then. At least here in the US. (Unrelated, Shimano's product range is crazy - somehow their components come stock on bikes ranging from $250 up to $12k or more.)

Outside of < $200 Wal-Mart bikes, I've never had any trouble repairing or finding someone to do "normal" repairs or maintenance on a bicycle. I'd like to know what prompted the article, unless the real point was to complain about E-Bike batteries, which is not something I can really comment on.

Personally, I love my smart home stuff. Homeassistant has been utterly reliable, automating things in node-red is easy and fun. I can use IKEA's stuff or buy from any of dozens of other Zigbee manufacturers. My plant lights go on and off at sunrise/sunset, my phone notifies me when there's movement on my porch or driveway, living room lights offer a nice ambience when I come home at night, etc.

It's mostly inessential stuff but it's nice. I tinker with the system maybe an hour or two every year and it all just works without any real drama or troubleshooting.

I don't know much about the flute world, but there's a guy on youtube who's been extending his contrabassoon's range to absurd new lows for years now. Here he is seven years back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8nRRwTnSbM

In the ensuing years he's been manufacturing a proper subcontrabassoon and here's a more recent video of its progress:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWQADWh3D8s

Zwift is great. I've been on it about three months and it really feels like the most productive training I've ever done. It's hard to get a decent ride in where I live but zwift is always available. They've managed to gamify real-world performance and it's surprisingly fun. There's a lot of different things to do in the game.

But be warned - it's a bit pricey to get up and running. All in, I'm sure I've spent at least $2k (USD) on various equipment and accessories and it's also $20/month for the service. To me it's worth it for sure, but running (for example) is very nearly free. Just make sure you think indoor cycling is something you'd be willing to stick with.

I have a hard time agreeing with the central premise here.

The article states that the Taliban had a protection scheme (possibly legitimate, possibly a racket) going on to effectively tax all trade through their regions and that made them a lot of money. I can believe that.

But calling that the "real economic prize" seems to miss the point. There was so much trade happening because of the tens of billions of US dollars flooding into the nation. If you take away all that money, you are left with a lot less economic activity to tax, and are probably dealing with customers and suppliers who can't afford nearly as much protection money.

If there was a true economic prize, it's the foreign aid coming in which will likely dry up soon. There are no major international shipping routes through Afghanistan (I think! see my note below), so without the foreign money they're left skimming off the top of trade through a poor developing nation, which doesn't seem like much of a prize at all.

However... the article states this : "Even before their blitz into the capital over the weekend, the Taliban had claimed the country’s real economic prize: the trade routes — comprising highways, bridges and footpaths — that serve as strategic choke points for trade across South Asia." I wish they'd elaborated more on this - are there some desirable routes going through Afghanistan that nations in the region might like to use for trade?

The "OS as a service" era was also when they really ramped up the advertising and telemetry in windows. It would be nice if they decide whatever revenue that brings is not worth the loss of good will people had for Microsoft before all that began and give it up.

I don't want to over-romanticize WSB, but this all seems fairly wholesome and even old-fashioned.

A hoard of like-minded investors put a lot of money into AMC because they felt it was under-valued and with a little push could ride out the pandemic. Now that it's on the rebound, they're not immediately cashing out with their short-term gains, instead they're encouraging the company to avoid wall street games like stock issuance and instead focus on organic growth as the economy recovers.

We were warned they were going to take down whole markets, but at this point they seem like agents of stability.

(Yes, I understand I may be giving the lads way too much credit here, but one can hope.)

I've been primarily a linux user for some time, so I've gotten pretty desensitized to various applications looking vastly different on the same system. But in the last several years that's mostly gone away - Gnome knows how to change the theme for QT apps and KDE can configure GTK themes so things are actually remarkably uniform.

But then when I fire up Windows, it is just this bizarre mix of all these different UI frameworks. I guess Windows isn't the big cash cow it once was for Microsoft and maybe it's not the highest development priority anymore, but still it's remarkably off-putting and I have no idea why they would let it stay in this state.

I read they were introducing a new UI framework to unify everything (Project Reunion), but I can't help but think that will mean it's just another different-looking toolkit thrown into the mix.

With all that said, Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility is fairly legendary so there could be an actual technical reason some things can't be redesigned with a newer toolkit.

I don't understand how this would work. You would tax corporations based on actual income? So money-losing businesses would have to pay taxes on their income even though they operated at a net loss? And low-volume/high-revenue businesses would pay less in taxes than high-volume/low-revenue would?

Since I mentioned Gradle aggravations, I'll share a couple:

1. Bizarre and inscrutable syntax. They say things like "build scripts are just Groovy code", but some things, like how you define sourcesets or configurations, don't look like anything that should parse, much less compile, in any C-like language. They're doing some fancy meta-programming stuff behind the scenes to keep things light and simple, but it really isolates (and possibly alienates) developers from exactly what's happening under the covers. The Kotlin DSL seems to help make it more clear what's going on, but I haven't used it much yet.

Having used Gradle for years, it is strangely off-putting how unsure I often am about whether to put a colon in a particular place or a comma, or if something should be in parenthesis.

2. If you want to do anything beyond what's documented you can get into a bit of trouble, and if you find answers more than a couple of years old there's a good chance they often won't work. Making sense of the DSL documentation is sometimes a little tricky.

Beyond that, I would dare say it's the least awful option for building for the JVM. Their documentation is very comprehensive, it's fast, they are very fair about providing deprecation warnings before features are removed. It's rare I find a case where I'd like to use some external library that has a Maven plugin but no Gradle support.

This is an oddly unconvincing little write-up.

Firstly, learning gradle doesn't mean you are learning Maven simply because most dependencies use pom files for their metadata. I just means there's a little XML document embedded in your dependencies that 99% of developers never pay attention to, whether they're using Maven or ant or any other build tool. It's entirely irrelevant.

Secondly, Gradle does not require you to learn Groovy. Use Kotlin if that's your thing - I get the impression that's the preferred DSL nowadays anyways.

Sadly I think those are the only two reasons really presented. Neither is especially convincing. IDE support seems just fine for both platforms.

I actually _like_ Gradle and I think I could come up with a longer list of things about it that aggravate me. But either way, use whatever build system you want, and if, as stated, their projects have fairly humble requirements build-wise, I'm sure either system will get the job done.

Yeah, I came here to say exactly this. I would guess that most people's schedules are based on wall clock times and DST doesn't matter, but I'm not really sure.

The author doesn't owe me anything, obviously, but I wish he had included a graph or two showing the normal variance (if any) over the same timeframe in a non-epidemic year. Then I'd have a bit more faith in his conclusions.

This makes a lot of sense to me.

Most of Docker's products are being superseded by other tools in the linux/enterprise world (buildah, podman, kubernets, etc), but the one area I think Docker still provides actual value to the industry is their Windows Docker distribution. I'm a developer running linux on a team filled with Windows users, and the fact that we can all share dockerfiles is a big benefit. Without docker there's a good chance I'd have to switch to windows or just find a new job.

Strange as it seems, I think the industry is moving such that soon enough most actual Docker users will be on Windows anyways. So why not just embrace that?

I'm not sure I agree much with this. When I first started learning Java I had six or seven years of programming experience and I still found dealing with matters of classpath and javac remarkably complicated. I had things down well enough with the tools I used before, but it all seemed so foreign in the Java world.

And to this day I find junior devs struggle with the same things unless they have a maven/gradle project all set up for them.

I'm all for folks learning these skills eventually, but in a first-year CS class I'd really rather students worry about the language and general concepts of writing software.

Lots of javascript tutorials start off with opening and browser's javascript console and typing out some simple stuff and I don't think people would tell them they need to jump straight into node.js and webpack.

All the other intricacies of writing systems will come to them but I find something uniquely wonderful about sitting and writing code, and if we're lucky we'll find students who can have that same experience. I'd rather meet them where they are and talk purely of the language and core concepts, and introduce them to the ugly details as their progress dictates.

This happened to me recently and it was pretty embarassing - I copied a two paragraph snippet from a psychology paper and the website put an ad for CBD oil in my clipboard above the paragraphs.

The segment I copied was just long enough that it overflowed my chat window so I had no idea the insertion was even there and I sent it as-is.

The recipient called me about two minutes later and said "hey, I think you've been hacked - you just sent me a CBD oil advertisement."

So yeah, I'd love to see user agents address this. If I push a copy button (like github's clone repo button) then fine, I'm at the mercy of their javascript. But if I copy via ctrl-C or a right click menu, it should not not let the page interfere.

This story has stuck with me for years. Any time I've over-promised what I could deliver or stand to miss a deadline or am otherwise stressed out by situations of my own creation it comes back to me.

This website often focuses on ambition and furiously chasing one's dreams, but it's nice to have reminders that in the end, it's the small comforts and relationships we've built that really matter.

I think you are underestimating how difficult it is to get a long-term visa for most European countries. Someone who is not employed or is soon to retire without an extraordinary amount of wealth has virtually no change of gaining entry outside of refugee crises/political persecution or other unusual circumstances.

A minor correction - the article makes a couple of mentions of "Handbrake donation[s]", but I think the author was referring to the donations made to KDE and Gnome by the Handshake project.

https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives...

I don't see much in the way of recommendations or best practices in this article, so here is what I can offer:

1. As mentioned already, get custom-molded in-ear monitors. They're wonderful. I dropped like $1500 on mine but someone below mentions much cheaper models. Mine are great, hopefully his are too. But this only works if everybody is playing direct or miked and you can get a reliable mix. Oh, and be careful working with inexperienced engineers because if you take a blast of shrieking feedback from one of these it's probably even worse than not wearing ears at all.

2. For bigger stuff, playing in an orchestra or whatever, where no mix is available, just go with earplugs. I find Etymotics uncomfortable for more than an hour or so, but some people like them. With about ten seconds of googling you can find some huge sample packs of disposable foam earplugs online, so you can try out lots of different varieties and find what works for you. And if you're new to playing with an orchestra, do not underestimate how loud they are. A brass section can absolutely compete with the loudest of guitar amps or drummers.

3. If at all possible, just don't play crazy loud gigs. If you end up with guitars, drums, bass, brass, whatever, all competing with each other for volume the overall mix will be a mess. I find few things less enjoyable than concerts where no one can control their stage volume and you just hear a poorly-mixed muddle of sound. If you've spent time honing your craft and learning the parts, why play in such a sub-par environment?

And in general, just take care of your ears. I'll wear earplugs on a motorcycle, in one especially loud datacenter I used to spend time in, at concerts, when using powertools (or even hammers), on aircraft, etc. I keep a huge pack of disposable earplugs I bought at Home Depot for like six bucks in my car and I use them regularly and hand them out to people as well.

The methods might be a bit more sophisticated now, but this has been going on for many years now.

A single call center may take calls for hundreds of consumer retail products, but if you call the 800 number for your high annual fee, high-balance card, you will absolutely be higher in priority than people who called about their pre-paid starter credit card. Asking for an operator won't change that.

More recently, the last 15-20 years or so, it became much more common for a "data dip" to happen when you call, or when data is provided, so the system can look you up and make intelligent routing decisions. If you've called before with a particular phone number, there's a decent chance the system already knows who you are and will prioritize you accordingly unless you provide account numbers suggesting otherwise.

Call centers (whether in-house or farmed out) are high-volume, low-margin enterprises. Everyone is frustrated dealing with them, and they prioritize reducing that frustration for high-value customers. It's definitely unfair at times (an errant $500 charge that would be trivial for someone rich could be devastating for someone poor, but the rich person's call will be taken first) but that's just how the business is.