jacksonkmarley

The Tarkovsky one apparently.

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl

Surprised no one mentioned this actually. For those not familiar it's a shooter located on the site of the accident where the disaster produced various mutant monsters and an unstable environment. Really immersive with the difficulty, story and ambience. Haven't seen the movie it was based on.

Also had this problem, tried to create exe packages on windows and had endless trouble (although windows apps aren't my expertise). The real killer in the end for me was some windows security feature that would start killing the process, not immediately, but after a couple of startups. It was an internal tool so in the end I used an executable batch script to start the program, that seemed to bypass the problem, but when it came time to add features and make things available for a wider audience I just abandoned the windows gui and moved to a web app.

I would also add that even the odd writer with a great early book or books commonly slumps down to meh and then churns it out from there on, which is sad.

It's like the fiction publishing industry had this technology for 10-20 years already.

DeFranco mobility routines (e.g. agile 8, limber 11) have good exercises.

This will make PLB (personal location beacons) redundant

Wouldn't this make the subscription satellite communications devices like inreach redundant, rather than PLBs? A safety conscious person in the wilds would probably still want a dedicated emergency device (?), only now it has another possible communication method to make it even more reliable.

PLBs as I understand it are designed specifically to be one-shot foolproof devices with no secondary comms, with guaranteed battery lives (15 years I think), robust cases etc. that just sit there until you press the 'Save me' button. A phone (or inreach which is closer but still has messaging etc.) is not a real replacement for that functionality as I see it. Mainly because the other things you use it for mean it can run out of batteries or whatever.

I'm certainly sick of reading about ChatGPT.

dual-wield and use a Linux or de-googled android phone for daily use and keep a second device around for the apps that won't run there

I was thinking about this but what happens with on-the-spot payments? This seems like a functionality that's really convenient (not having to carry a bank card) but that would be on the official device, not the daily use device due to security issues. But paying for stuff in person is a daily use activity.

So here is a piece of anecdata for those interested in comparisons to vscode, I saw this hn post and installed the jupyter desktop app, and set up my current play project on it (sicp exercises in jupyter, I'd previously been using the browser). I also set up the same thing in vscode.

For this example I couldn't get vscode to perform correctly (maybe possible but not obvious), while the desktop app worked as advertised.

Vscode mistakenly labelled the cells of my scheme notebook as python, while correctly running the scheme kernel. The result was that I could run my cells and get the right output, but entering code was annoying as the auto indenting and error markers were based on python instead of scheme.

Anyway, unless I can fix the vscode weirdness, score one for the desktop app, I will keep using it.

Reddit fitness subs have a surprising amount of information in their wiki(s)

https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...

You mentioned "digital nomad influencers" a few times, were you trying to start businesses as a digital nomad, or was that just something you saw as a common feature of the "influencers" you paid attention to?

So far this whole Twitter Files thing seems underwhelming, but not exactly a "nothing burger". I feel like it's a good thing that they got published, but the details aren't big news, more like a whole bunch of mildly unsatisfactory situations that probably should be addressed by people directly involved.

For example FBI trawling through social media and flagging accounts for review doesn't seem like a strict constitutional violation unless you can prove some coercion; but it does seem like a questionable use of the FBI to be doing content moderation for Twitter absent a criminal investigation.

Maybe this sort of stuff (i.e. government/law enforcement communications with social media companies) should be automatically in the public domain if it isn't part of a criminal investigation.

Or to express the headline in a less clickbaity (or metaphorical) way:

California slashes rates paid for household solar contributions back to the grid.

What is the point of this? To me this reads like contentless wordplay, some random software-insider negativity with a bit of anti-capitalism thrown in. I didn't really find any interesting points worth engaging with either positively or negatively.

TBH I would have just downvoted this if I could. If you're scanning comments before reading, don't bother with it.

Listened to a lot of audiobooks this year, and can recommend:

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan (Biography and background to the development of the ICBM)

The American War in Afghanistan: A History by Carter Malkasian

One Minute to Midnight by Michael Dobbs (about the Cuban missile crisis)

Chip War by Chris Miller (about the semiconductor industry and it's place in geopolitical competition)

By JFK Jr.

He's been dead for like 20 years. I think you mean RFK Jr.

Paul Theroux describes here visiting Borges and reading to him, I always think of this when I think of Borges.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/31/r...

Personally I don't have much experience with people behaving like this, motivated by straight-up laziness or covering up incompetence so blatantly. These seem like they would be very obvious problem behaviours, and not as damaging as other more common but perhaps less overtly dishonest habits of overrated people.

I have encountered many people who behave in harmful ways according to personal or organisational incentives that they or others could argue were legitimate. Technical people promoted above their managerial competence level for example, can end up being rated highly by upper management as they are seen to be experts, but can then go on to make terrible strategic decisions.

Also non-technical project management professionals, using techniques that could be interpreted as legitimate, can be rated highly despite contributing next to nothing. Asking tech contributors for deadline estimates, recording the answers, and then chasing the overruns can seem like constructive action.

Then you realise that there are no high level plans coming back that integrate the timelines in a constructive way, it's just a way to apply psychological pressure by getting investment in a target that can be held over people's heads.

The micro-management goes away somehow as the game goes on? I should cancel the refund claim LOL?

I got this on steam, started with the tutorial, and after a few minutes couldn't imagine getting any enjoyment out of playing this. What am I missing? The level of micro-management seems so high, and simple actions seem to require clicking through like 4 sub menus.

Working through sicp in my spare moments.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a1564/memento-mo...

Jonathon Nolan short story which I haven't read, and the related Christopher Nolan film Memento.

edit: I read it and it's actually pretty good, but with annoying advertisements.

What exactly does this mean? Doesn't the baseband processor exclusively handle the mobile communications? I thought the parent comment was more to do with OS running on the main processor.

This is really interesting to me because my previous job had a big project, and they started writing down the documentation up front with the goal of specifying everything and getting it all reviewed and signed off. Years later everyone panicked because the documentation was still in progress and nothing had been implemented.

Perhaps the missing sauce was a good systems engineer advising the bosses? How do successful projects avoid this sort of problem? Is it common? It was really frustrating to be a contributor knowing that the whole thing was a disaster but not knowing if your ideas to make things better were useful or a waste of time, even if you could get anyone to listen.

Even if not explicitly set that way, I found that windows security can intermittently end up blocking unsigned stuff, which if anything is even more annoying than a consistent rule. Had this problem when trying to make a python gui executable.

I'm glad you also enjoyed the story! In that case perhaps we just have a difference in our definitions, since I would interpret 'wordy' as implying some disapproval at an excess of words.

The whole description is wordy

I for one really enjoyed reading this story, it was quite exciting and I never noticed anything 'wordy' about it. I thought it was very well written.

(Calling the NHS doctor in the UK.)

Me: I want to make an appointment

Receptionist: you can only make an appointment on the same day as you call, and you have to call between 0830 and 0900

Me: Really? Er...

(Next day around 0845) Ring ring ring ring ring...

(0900) Me: No-one answered between 0830 and 0900

Receptionist: you can only make an appointment on the same day as you call, and you have to call between 0830 and 0900

Me: ???

Especially if you are in 'X startup scene', when you are looking for your next position can you not just screen for companies which match your preferences?

People who like being exclusively in-office work for company x, people who want only remote company y, people who like hybrid company z, etc.? I feel like there are a million possible legit reasons to prefer different modes, and now there are more choices available.