debok

I'm also incredibly curious about this. I sent them an e-mail. Let's see if they respond.

In my church we still use the Genevan Psalter in our worship. It is not the same as Sacred Harp, but many of the same principles apply, and it makes for excellent communal singing. I could definitely hear the similarities, but it is hard to explain exactly what they are.

The principles used during composing the Genevan Psalter was: 1) It should be easy to sing for untrained singers 2) It should sound sacred 3) It should be of high artistic quality

Also, the article meations the "deepest past." The Genevan Psalter comes from the 1540's, and many Reformed churches still uses it all over the world. That's some serious deep past.

I wonder if the Genevan Psalter influenced Sacred Harp?

Having built serverless apps and "old-fashioned" apps, I seriously believe the old fashioned way is better.

The best of both worlds is to host on AWS EC2 or a similar product from your web service provider of choice.

Am I reading that graph right? That confidence dropped in all the measured categories? That's wild.

A kettle uses ~1.5KW, a geyser ~2KW, an oven ~5KW, a stove about ~3KW. These are fairly high estimates I got from some quick googling. If you add these all up, and account for some more appliances (HVAC, fridge/freezer etc.), I think it is safe to estimate that a household less than 20KW at peak, even though it is a fairly high estimate.

So going backwards from there, 1.2MW = 1200KW and 1200KW / 20KW = 60 households at peak usage. Which is a very conservative estimate.

For future reference I will use 1MW = 50 households as a conservative rule of thumb. Maybe 100 households per MW is closer to reality, but that feels fairly lenient to me.

I completely agree with you. My wife and I made many lifestyle "sacrifices" in order to have kids. I put "sacrifices" in quotes, because driving in a cheaper car than your professional peers is only a sacrifice if you you are consumerist.

Why would Kotlin be named after Kotlin Island? What's the connection?

It's ironic that my password manager also added to the noise. The one thing I do control makes it even worse.

I found the following 3 measures quite helpful to make my smartphone less intrusive in my daily life:

1: I don't bring my smartphone into my bedroom. My bedroom is a personal and intimate space, no need for the outside world to barge in via smartphone.

2: I disable or silence every notification I get. The only time my phone draws my attention is if I am getting a phone call, my wife texts me, or if I get a Pagerduty.

3: I uninstalled or disabled all social media apps.

Number 2 had the biggest impact on my family and work life. When I spend time with my kids, my phone only rarely interrupts me.

See my answer to your sibling comment by thorslilcuz.

Kamq also makes a good point.

Huh, interesting that this is the hill I have to die on. If I google "are trampolines death traps" the results seem to be about 50/50 yes/no.

Anyway, here are the benefits:

1) More freedom, as they can get on the trampoline from any side instead of just the entrance. This Makes for more interesting games on/around the trampoline.

2) Easier for a parent to get to them when necessary.

3) I also jump on the trampoline.

4) Without the net, there is more to the trampoline than just a place to jump (ties in with point 1). E.g. We had our family dinner on the trampoline more than once.

5) The increased risk makes it more fun. Kids have and enjoy adrenaline too.

To answer the drawbacks (increased risk):

1) I also got hurt falling from a trampoline once as a teen, that was because I behaved the way a teen boy would.

2) The kids know where the dangerous parts of the trampoline is (i.e. near the sides).

My wife and I take the approach of allowing our kids take risks too. Even though it is not that socially acceptable. If people want to judge me for letting my 4yo boy help with building and lighting a fire, then let them.

There is so many things you can do in the home as a parent to encourage kids to take controllable risks. My oldest was helping his mother with knife-work in the kitchen from as early as 3. I also removed the enclosure net from the trampoline in our backyard. I buy bicycles for my kids as early as possible. I rough-and-tumble with my kids on an almost daily basis.

Of course there are limits. We try to keep it age appropriate, around some dangerous areas (fire, deep water, the road) we always keep them supervised. We teach them about the dangers. We teach them how to manage the risks.

Luckily my brother-in-law also removed the enclosure net on their backyard trampoline after he saw that my kids were OK jumping on an open trampoline. So it seems our attitude is starting to have a positive affect on the families around us.

I'm not saying that we don't learn from the mistakes of the past. There were many misplaced wars and crusades in the past, and we should learn from them.

However, the author of the OP article is throwing shade on JBP because he is rehashing old ideas like "tell the truth, be true to yourself, see challenges as opportunities, set a good example." Those won't exactly lead to a crusade, would it? Even if you scale it up, that's some good and true wisdom. The author shows his folly by discarding these "old, stale" ideas for no other reason than them being old, stale ideas.

Also to quote the article:

He can give people the most elementary fatherly life-advice (clean your room, stand up straight) while making it sound like Wisdom

Yes, because fatherly life-advice is straight-up wisdom. Wisdom is remarkably mundane at times. Also, if you look at these ideas in their abstract:

clean your room -> take care of what you have, even if it is little

stand up straight -> have some self-respect

These abstract ideas also scale up well. That's also not exactly crusade material.

I don't know why HN is so anti-Peterson. He has been tremendously helpful to me, and 12 Rules for Life helped me a lot when I was going through self-inflicted tough times.

The article derides him for for stating platitudes, truisms, and cliches (I am actually surprised that the article didn't include that word) in new and interesting ways. However, that is exactly what he is popular for in the first place. A more charitable way to put that, might be to say that he restates old-timey wisdom in new and interesting ways. Of course this is going to appeal to conservatives, and bring struggling young people to the conservative side.

Between Jordan Peterson and C.S. Lewis, I rediscovered a lot of wisdom that my parents tried to teach me. I learned to respect old and ancient ideas. Ideas aren't "wrong" because they're old, and also they aren't right or good because they're new. People throughout history was smarter and wiser than we give them credit for.

Maybe if more "serious" intellectuals (whatever that means), moved past the "new=good and old=bad" groove, they might start enjoying some popularity too.

My point is that Jordan Peterson is re-introducing some very true, but old ideas. These old ideas are very helpful to a lot of people, especially disenfranchised young men. These young men then use the old ideas to get their lives together, and that is why Jordan Peterson is popular.

"He shows a culture bereft of ideas, a politics without inspiration or principle."

No, he shows us the gold that our intellectuals threw on the rubbish heap, because they thought it was junk. And just because they still think it is junk, doesn't actually make it junk.

The South African situation is very nuanced. The ANC had a violent faction, and a more peaceful faction aimed at reconciliation. The well-known Nelson Mandela belonged to the latter faction. Note that I said "more peaceful" and not "peaceful." Nelson Mandela also participated in sabotage attacks during Apartheid.

Those two factions are still alive in the ANC now that it is the ruling party. It just takes a different shape now that violence isn't the modus operandi anymore. You could call it a far-left radical faction, and a moderate faction. The far-left radical faction is heavily influenced by Fanon, they openly admit it. Also on the far-left you have the EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) who were kicked out of the ANC for being too far-left. They also claim to be Fanonian. They are openly calling for violence, while simultaneously denying that they are calling for violence.

The violence prevalent in South Africa is caused by a wide array of causes, of which I expect Fanonian thought to be one of the lesser causes (but a cause none-the-less). A bigger cause is an inept and corrupt government by a political party that is still stuck in revolutionary rhetoric 30 years after it's victory. Their inept and corrupt governance caused degradation in law-enforcement, to the point where it is almost non-existent. Pair this with the abject poverty and fatherlessness caused by Apartheid, and you have yourself an unruly and violent populace.

Fanonian thought only factors in when things get political. In my opinion that is less commonplace than the media (both mainstream and otherwise) suggests. Our violence is mostly just normal plain old crime.

Huh. I read the story more as an exploration on what the phrase "human life is sacred" really means. To me the whole AI thing was just a backdrop.

I worked for a bootstrapped startup where the opposite was true. While the company was in survival mode, employees were highly valued and the owners had a "we're in it together" type of attitude. When the money started rolling in, their attitude changed to "we are better than you." They moved all their employees to a different office than themselves, and started treating us like we are expendable. They lost all their competent staff in a year, and had to start relying on freelancers to get anything done.

Yes, that's a very apt description

Hi Lars

Thank you very much for this write-up.

I lost my 21 year old brother in law to leukemia a few years back. Even though I didn't experience the same severity of pain as my wife or in-laws, I was still there through all of it. I saw my parents-in-law taking care of their dying son, who only a few months ago was a promising ornithology student, and the fittest player on his soccer team. What you wrote resonates a lot with what they said, and what I saw them go through.

Thank you for including the reference to Daniel 3, it has been a source of strength for my in-laws too. My brother-in-law got a lot of his strength from Philippians 1:21 "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."

The love and care that you provide to your son does not go unnoticed or unseen.

One thing I learned from my in-laws' tragedy, was that the grief never goes away, but you will grow stronger in dealing with it.

I will be hugging my own kids extra-hard when I get home from work this afternoon.

I used to not mind the Youtube ads, but it became a nuisance lately. I installed an adblocker for the first time somewhere mid-2023.

If I knew that youtube would continue to show me one skippable ad for every ~10 minutes, I would gladly disable my ad-blocker for them. Banner ads and side-bar ads are also fine.

Homelessness

Hunger

Slavery

Genocide

All are greatly reduced in the last 100-150 years. Globally. In large part thanks to "Western" contributions to science.

The rest are some very developed and sophisticated atrocities. Being developed and sophisticated doesn't make people good, it just makes their evil deeds more sophisticated and developed.

Just to qualify: I'm not trying to promote the noble savage myth here either. I'm trying to say that the simplicity/sophistication scale is orthogonal to the good/evil scale.

Something that wasn't really addressed in the article is that smooth operation of the economy also saves lives.

To put in terms of the infinite trolley problem: The longer the trolley gets, the bigger the probability that one of the passengers is an EMT commuting to his shift, where being late could cost a life. You can add many such passengers, with various levels of complexity, where being late could end up costing a life or a livelihood.

So at some point, not hitting the brakes becomes worthwhile even just in terms of lives saved. The problem is that it is very hard to measure the exact impact of "inconveniencing" the 8 million passengers. I expect many lives will be lost if you stop a train with 8 million passengers for ~15 minutes. I would probably not stop the train with even less passengers, maybe a few hundred thousand.

Edit: added the last paragraph, to drive my point home.

I have to disagree on this one. Most jokes that I have heard or read weren't funny at all. And seeing that I'm a dad, most jokes that I tell aren't funny either.

I love the last paragraph, it's a great attitude to have. We should apply it in other areas of our lives too. It's like putting up Christmas lights, we rarely enjoy our own Christmas lights, but people driving or walking past our homes do enjoy them a lot.

The ASP.NET framework is nice. I had more struggles with Entity Framework, to the point where I regretted not just writing raw SQL for my data access needs.

This was also back in 2019 when I last did serious work in C#, so things might have changed a lot since then.

In my experience, this is mostly a JVM issue. When I code in the JVM, I feel like I fight my frameworks and libraries more often than writing actual code. Looking at you in particular, Spring Boot.

I had similar experiences in C#.NET and Python (especially SQLAlchemy), albeit less often and less frustrating.

In Golang, the frameworks and libraries tend to stay out of your way. I feel way more productive.

The trade-off is that I am writing more boilerplate. IMO that is a worthwhile tradeoff, especially since things tend to then be more explicit. More explicit is nice for maintenance anyway. Also, with how far AI code helpers have come, boilerplate is even less of an issue.

The Russian peasant built their brick ovens with a flat top large enough to lie on. This gave them a warm place to sleep or lie down.

It is explained in the footnotes on the linked story.

You mention in the article:

Which undoubtedly well meaning civil servant long before World War II came up with the brilliant idea of registering religious affiliation during the census is lost in the mists of time.

I guess this happened because The Netherlands used to be a very religious nation?

I mean, in 1901 they got Abraham Kuyper[0] as a prime minister. Abraham Kuyper was a Christian minister, and is well-known among Reformed Christian circles as a very impactful theologian.

It is very understandable that a nation like that would want to list religion as part of their census data.

0: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Kuyper>

Yeah. I was hoping for a list of hacks that got promoted to standards. That would have been a really cool read.

I'm less predisposed to mysticism, but I agree with you conclusion on "You don't get to keep anything." I would also add "You don't get to buy your way in."

Often in the gospels we hear Jesus say things that stump both us and the hearers at the time. It is almost like he is inviting us to search for meaning behind his words. He is speaking in metaphors, and that much is clear with how "off" his responses sometimes feel to us.