j_m_b

This is how I learned lisp. I then went on to learn Clojure and built a career around it.

I'm late to the game but this question has been bouncing around in my head and I wanted to give my opinion as a sports fan. I also coach my son's soccer team so to be clear, I have nothing against soccer.

The real question is: Why isn't soccer more popular in the US?

Soccer is a very wide game. It's easy to understand and easy to start playing. Don't touch the ball with your hands and kick the ball into the goal. It's easy enough that six year olds with coed teams can start playing and have fun. It explains the huge youth participation in the US.

Soccer, however, lacks depth. Games likes baseball and football have deep strategy and specialization that soccer/basketball/hockey just can't match. It's checkers vs chess. You can develop widely different skill sets in these games.

Basketball is soccer/hockey on speed. The games are a progression of incremental advantage. Each goal scored is another adrenaline shot for the fans. It's a long chain of dopamine hits. It allows for momentum shifts.

It's no wonder then that the majority of athletic talent in the US is funneled into one of three sports in the US: football , baseball and basketball.

The big conundrum is: Why is hockey so much more popular than soccer in America? I think it's because it's a condensed arena, faster game play and has lots of aggressive plays. Whatever the answer may be, I think it will prove key in answering why soccer just hasn't caught on professionally in the US.

I don't hate soccer. I'm definitely going to be watching some world cup games. If I had a magic wand, I would implement the promotion/relegation system for every major league sport in the US. Let the owners take a haircut if they have bad teams! I think it's an excellent system which really make the owners have some skin in the game.

I just don't think soccer is compelling enough of a game to draw eyeballs away from the big three.

We're at the top of the S-curve and you're romanticizing diminishing returns with vague hints of super human capabilities and singularities.

Nostalgia aside... these things aren't really that great and are overpriced for what they are. TI sustains itself on basically extorting high schools and colleges to use that.. because most of the teachers just used these.

I'm not sure such a device really improved any understanding of the underlying mathematics that I was taught. In fact, in more advanced mathematics these machines can't even keep up.

IN MICE should be added to this title

Oh I have some other common phrases I've been collecting!

"to be honest" "...the thing..." "I mean.." "Yah yah yah" people say this rapidly. It seems rude and dismissive to me so I've stopped doing it

Computing has made intimate sexual relationships worse.

Dating apps are skewed: men receive little attention while women have an overwhelming amount of attention.

Porn satisfies our most base sexual functions while abandoning truly intimate connections.

The ultimate goal of sexual unions has been demonized and turned into something to avoid. That being children. After school specials since the 80s have made pregnancy a horror to avoid instead of a joy to grasp.

AI is just the latest iteration of technology increasing the divide between the sexes.

When the clankers come, we're fucked.

Also, no one knows how to make a Pizza! (great book for kids)

It might have been more like C&H or Far Side at one time, but by the time of the 80s when I first started reading the funny pages, Peanuts was just another mundane strip.

The spaceship beaming people up in Defender always looked like it's proportions were off. As a kid, I remember seeing the spaceship and thinking it looked like a metal glove.

Better would be a docker container for an IRC server. Something using a modern approach where you could have link attachments, replies for message threads etc. An IRC slack alternative.

If this can do character consistency, that's huge. Just make it do the same for video...

One way that thinking for yourself goes wrong is that you realize your society is wrong about something, don’t realize that you can’t outperform it, and wind up even wronger.

many such cases

So funny how people think this is a moral crusade. You should read articles around the tech stack for payment processing at any adult site. People try to do chargebacks all of the time on these kind of services. "Hunny what is this transaction on our account for BigBussomsCom?" .. "Oh must be some kind of fraud" "then let's call the bank and straighten it out". It's variations of this, over and over that lead to the high chargeback rates. I seem to recall that chargebacks are an order of magnitude higher for adult-oriented transactions. Unless you have a system of countering this with a team devoted to it, you will have a lot of successful chargebacks. I doubt Valve has the specialized team needed to deal with the amount of chargebacks, this the CC companies trying to avoid the headache.

One of my favorite visualizations of the scale of the solar system is from Stephen Hawking's Genius.

https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/hawking_genius_ep...

It's a hands-on, practical example of how far things are away that we can easily visualize. I highly recommend the rest of the series as well. It's one of the best science shows ever produced. It shows the practical path of scientific discovery. You can watch is on the PBS app, which requires a $60 a year pass. Highly worth it. (I have no affiliation with PBS)

This is cool! I made a similar app, but for guitar. However, I couldn't quite figure out how long I should sample. I wanted to make an app where it will play an interval and then you need to play it back on the guitar. If you can get this to work on a harmonica, I should be able to get it to work with a guitar. Will likely use your source for more inspiration, thanks!

"tough love" versions of responses can clean them up some.

This is the first filter on the incoming mass layoffs.

Nice work! Would be cool to have a plugin system that could allow for interfacing with other DBs like sqlite etc.

In the US, we've essentially banned swimming outside of a few lifeguard-monitored zones. There are no swimming signs everywhere and in places you wouldn't otherwise think should be banned, such as public lakes or beaches. People still do swim in these areas, but I remember a squad of cop cars showing up at Lake Artemesia near UMD because a woman was gasp swimming in the lake.

This is actually a very good point. The family I visited travel 1hr+ to get healthcare services because the local ones are pretty bad. They're not elderly per se, only a few years into retirement but they definitely have health issues that come with old age. They're relatively well-off and live in the nicer section of Cumberland where doctors and lawyers lived. I can't imagine how bad it is for people who are just getting by.

A NES emulator in Typescript targeting the browser. I've been using the Messenger emulator with cycle-accurate emulation to hone it. This stems from my interest in low-level machine code and understanding how computers work. I want to eventually write my own virtual machine and create a functional programming language on top of it.

That actually explains a lot. They are trying to expand their tax base. The improvements stipend will allow them to assess the property at a higher value!

I just got back from a visit with family in Cumberland. It's the epitome of rust belt. What used to be a thriving manufacturing area has become an abandoned service-sector economy with low-wage jobs. Property values are dirt cheap, even for nice houses. There isn't much nearby, you have to travel hours from Pittsburgh to even get there by plane. Tales of theft of items like power tools from relatively remote farms are common. It doesn't look quite as bad as videos I've seen of poorer parts of Appalachia, but it's pretty close. I don't know how they will be able to afford this as the tax base has all but left and Cumberland is trying to pinch every penny they can to afford their over-compensated government staff. It's a pretty sad state of affairs, this seems more like a last-ditch marketing effort.

This looks like a more general use system whereas gokrazy is Go-specific.

I always upvote mentions of Nand2Tetris, this course helped me understand how computers REALLY work. I'm in the middle of writing a Typescript NES emulator. Even with the help of the excellent Mesen emulator, it's a challenging task! It amazes me how people could first write these emulators that worked so well in the 90s with such few resources.

Gnome-tweaks + customization of terminal shortcuts is what I currently use on Ubuntu for when I need to run a Linux desktop. If key bindings could be read from a file, it would be a nice leap forward. A GUI could be built up on top of that. You could just have your key bindings in ~/.cosmicrc or ~/config/cosmic/keybindings.

I've been curious about PopOS for awhile and so glad to see the development of their own desktop environment.

And I'm the type who always remaps his Caps Lock key to Escape, but there's no place to do that yet, and the Gnome-Tweaks app won't work, either. Some of this is probably the distribution itself, some of it is

If System76 devs are reading this, please prioritize key remapping! I have years of macOS shortcuts burned into my cerebral cortex, it's a no-go for me to try and learn Linux ones, especially considering I use a Mac daily for work. Would be nice if this could even be a separate theme, so I could just download a file with macOS key bindings and edit it. A 1-1 GUI -> file config would be icing!

Software has gotten so bad over the past couple of decades. It's not as responsive as it was even in the 80-90s, yet we have orders of magnitude more powerful machines. Even simple website forms are often broken, due to everything from poor implementations to bit rot. It's perhaps just a coincidence that this time period has also been the rise of agile.

We could do with a lot less grass lawns and a lot more gardens. Even just growing flowers adds tremendously to the local ecosystem of insects, while adding beauty to your life. If this gets more people thinking about gardening, I'm all for it!